Chap 178: My Destiny
The next morning, after the chaos of the Balance Seal and MegaSapian fiasco, Primus was calm. Almost normal, at least.
Breakfast revealed a messy kitchen. Pots, pans, plates, and cups from the previous night were scattered across counters.
“These are overnight dishes,” Zod muttered.
“Why are they dirty?” Miko asked, bewildered.
All eyes turned to Kie. He clenched his jaw. Tee had been responsible for washing the dishes the previous night. She hadn’t returned to the living complex, and hadn't shown up for dinner.
“Tee. Speaking of her, my aura-sensing seems to be working,” Saeda added. “Perhaps she’s far, far away.”
“No one knows when she’ll return,” Zod said. “Which means Kie has to do her share of dish duty.”
“The Freck I’m not,” Kie growled.
“You had no problem doing her share while waiting for her to wake up in the infirmary,” Saeda reminded him.
Kie swallowed hard, meeting her gaze without a word. He was not going to argue. They gave him ten minutes to wash as much as he could before breakfast duties began.
Tee better get her butt back there, he raged silently. Unlike her, he washed immediately after training and again after dinner. Tee hated cleaning, leaving everything to pile up after dinner.
Later, after the morning warmup, the Commander barked his greeting at the cadets assembled in the training room. Tee was missing, but he chose not to dwell on it. He doubted any of the cadets present knew where she was anyway.
Accustomed to early training routines, Tee felt strange staying in bed. She changed into clothes more like the Vergant girls her age—a shirt and skirt under her hooded robe—but kept her boots, essential to her movement.
As she ran down the hallway, she bumped into Engel carrying a platter of twigs.
“I have brought thee thy breakfast, for I remember that ye of the modern world do eat much.”
Tee smiled at Engel. They sat on the carpet while she ate. The twig she tried had a surprisingly savory flavor, almost like roasted chicken, with faint smokiness and a lingering earthy bitterness.
She offered him one. “Want one?”
“The Vergants eat not,” Engel replied.
Tee froze. “What?”
“We do infuse our bodies with Ether when we enter the Verge, and it giveth unto us a fullness. We have no need to eat, for the energy dwelleth already within us. Yet when it is spent, we are made faint, even as with hunger. Only then may we have need to eat. Yea, we are made so feeble that we cannot fix our minds to return unto the Verge again. A grievous estate it is.”
Tee swallowed and said, “Your loss. You should taste Miko's cooking.” Memories of broken glass and Miko’s nervous hands made her take a final swallow.
“Engel, I need your help. My boots are at my old living complex. I can’t live without them. Help me get them and get back here, please.”
“Of a surety. The hour of study is not yet come. I shall tarry for thee.”
Soon, Tee was at a lower base in Primus, near the teleportation station the soldiers used. She stepped forward when a hologram flashed before her—the Commander’s fiery green eyes piercing through.
“Cadet, in my office. Now.”
Tee sighed. She explained that Aven and Engel would help her strengthen her Balance Seal—she didn’t want it breaking on a fHarbinger mission.
“Is that a bad thing? The MegaSapian would get erased with the reset,” the Commander asked.
“Look, I won’t be coming back to the living complex. Forget about training,” Tee said.
The Commander stared at her, then nodded. “Fine. As long as you wear your telecom at all times. It’s your responsibility when the battery dies.”
He handed her the device. Tee, grinning, bowed deeply.
“I thank thee, oh gracious Commander. I will not forget thy generosity on this day.”
She dashed through the cold hallways, unseen, and packed boots and other essentials. Aven and Engel waited when she returned.
“You came back,” Aven said, his shoulders slumping slightly.
“You sound disappointed,” she teased.
He pulled his hood over his face, hiding his expression.
“I’m just going to hang around you from now on. I spoke with the Commander and he said it was fine. He even gave me a telecom. I also want to make my Verge better. A Sentinel cannot have a damaged Verge, right?”
“Don’t get carried away,” Aven warned. “Verging isn’t as easy as it sounds.”
Inside their study sanctum, Tee noticed the old flatscreen televisions—archaic and out of place. Aven sat cross-legged on the floor, floating tabs circling him. The rustle of the aluminum bag and the crunching sounds made it impossible for him to concentrate.
Tee had brought snacks from her room and showed Engel how to chew properly, rolling and swallowing the food.
“Wait,” Engel said. “What entereth in must needs come forth again. Lo, it hath been many years since I did purge my bowels.”
Tee laughed. “So how do I do this verging thing again?”
Aven cleared the tabs neatly, then met her gaze. “At last, you’re ready.”
He began to walk with his hands at his back as he spoke. Tee felt like a lecture was coming and she was right.
“Verging is waking up the untapped part of the full brain. Modern men don't use the full brain. They only use roughly ten percent…”
He continued to speak, and Tee listened carefully.
Verging was incredibly important—not just as a means to perform sorcery, but as a way to access a wealth of information and share it with others. Through verging, one could tap into the planet’s life stream, which contained the past, present, and future.
The inhabitants of the planet used verging to detect imbalances in planetary forces, such as locating fragments or identifying open rifts during Leak missions. But the information within the Verge was never presented clearly—sometimes it was hazy, incomplete, or impossible to pinpoint exactly where things were in the present.
It was through verging that the elders had learned of the Harbingers. But the Harbingers operated on a dark side of the Verge the elders could not safely explore, leaving them with only fragments of knowledge about who—or what—the Harbingers truly were.
Tee grew very curious about what Aven and Engel did.
“So what do you two do on a normal day like this? Surely not reading all day,” she asked.
Aven replied, “We are apprentices, training to become grand elders of the Vergants.” He sighed. “Though there has been a shift in elder studies. Elders and apprentices may no longer be needed.”
Tee frowned, confused.
Engel explained that apprentices and elders might have to change course, since the elders no longer needed to spend their lives sensing signs of fragments. Several months ago, they had finally discovered one—and then others! The question now was whether grand elders would even be necessary.
Tee made it clear that it was Aven and Engel’s problem, not hers. She had no desire to become an apprentice or elder.
The Elders at Primus—the so-called grand elders—were the only Vergants who dealt with matters involving the modern world.
Aven told her that, long ago, he had seen modern people for the first time in his home village. Some villagers had interacted with them, and he had been fascinated—those people lived on the same planet but in a completely different world. That fascination had driven him to leave his village and pursue the path of an apprentice to become a grand elder. But with the recent shifts, that dream might never be realized.
Aven decided it was time for Tee to learn to verge. He warned her that the process was extremely difficult for modern-worlders to grasp and could take years. That was discouraging, but Tee was confident. She was an A student, after all.
He stepped before her and sat down. Engel, being only thirteen, did not think it wise to interfere. Since both of them would enter the Verge, unaware of the conscious world, it was better that someone remained behind.
Aven asked once more, “Do I have your permission?”
“Yes,” Tee said.
He held her hand, and together they entered her Verge.
Unlike last time, there weren’t two versions of her fighting for control. She remembered Aven’s words about her Verge being the worst he had seen—and she understood why.
The world around her felt fractured and wrong, jagged, as though walking through a memory shattered into pieces. The crystalline floor was splintered, shards jutting up like broken glass.
Each fragment reflected a memory from her past, but none were whole. Some were cracked, edges splintered and warped. Others hovered at impossible angles, spinning or trembling as if afraid to fall apart completely.
The golden light of the frozen sunset glared to one side. Rays splintered across the shards, casting jagged reflections and long shadows that twisted across the floor. The Verge itself hummed with unease, a low vibration that rattled her bones and made the air feel unstable.
“That’s the Balance Seal,” Aven said, pointing.
As Tee stared at the light, she noticed glowing glyphs—thousands of intricate, circular patterns interlaced with other shapes. They pulsed and shimmered, bright and mesmerizing.
When Tee reached for a shard, it rattled violently. The memory inside was distorted—voices muffled or overlapping, laughter and crying clashing into one another. Faces she remembered were stretched or fractured, sometimes disappearing entirely when she tried to focus. The Verge felt alive, wounded, and angry, scorched by some unseen war.
As she moved, shards shifted unpredictably. Some collided into each other, others fell into invisible chasms yawning beneath the floor. Tee had to step carefully, balancing on fragments that might crumble under her weight. The Verge wasn’t just a place of memory—it was a battlefield of her own past, broken and left in pieces.
She tried to focus on a memory of herself smiling, only to realize it was her and Kie during their short relationship. They were on the beach, him spinning her over his shoulder.
She couldn’t smile, pulling away as though it were poison.
“I’m in my Verge, so what now?” she asked.
Aven found a steady place to sit. “Remember, in here you have no Ultramana or dark mana power. Try to focus on where you are. Connect the unconscious realm with the conscious one.”
Tee meditated in silence for what felt like hours. Unsure of what she should feel, she finally said she needed a break and snapped out of the Verge. Engel was by the window, staring at the people below.
Aven was pulled from her Verge, stumbling back in confusion, his face reflecting disbelief.”
“What?” Tee asked.
“You managed to leave your Verge without intervention by another,” he said, clearly impressed. “Try entering it again, on your own.” He held out his hand.
Tee tried repeatedly with no success. Then Aven placed her hood over her head. She gasped—the darkness encamped her, scattered with millions of faraway stars. It was peaceful, until Aven’s voice broke the quiet.
“Concentrate.”
She blinked—and was back in her Verge. Aven sensed she was no longer with him and stepped back in shock.
“Unbelievable,” he gasped. “She entered into her Verge alone.”
Engel dashed from the window upon hearing those words.
Tee pulled the hood back and opened her eyes. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
For the rest of the week, Aven couldn’t stop mumbling about how unusual it was. Modern-worlders shouldn’t be able to enter that part of their mind so easily. Perhaps being a Sentinel with her powers—had awakened her Verge as well.
Tee was to focus on fixing her Verge, but she felt proud. Engel kept praising her, and Aven’s constant muttering only boosted her confidence. Verging was necessary for sorcery, and now she could do it—though she needed her hood. She imagined the possibilities, even changing her hair and eye color. Red eyes, she thought. She gasped at the idea of finding a cure.
As Aven searched through historical records of modern-worlders who learned to verge quickly, Tee asked, “Can you help me make a cure for the Xenogene?”
Engel and Aven stopped walking. Aven laughed, drawing the attention of several in the library.
“Interesting,” Engel commented, one hand at his chin.
“Why do modern people always assume we can poof things into being?” Aven muttered. “As though anything can be done instantly.”
Tee said firmly, “Since I’m the Xeno-victim here, I have the personal drive. That’s why it’s my task. Like Engel said, I could become the most powerful elder—this Balance Seal is great and all, but I could still die out of the blue. And worst, no one would even notice.”
“No, someone would find you in time before you start rotting,” Aven reassured her. Changing the subject, he added, “Remember, the Seal is not immune to breaking. Don’t tamper with it.”
“Besides, how can you manipulate what you know nothing about?” he continued, hand to his head. “The Xenogene is still a mystery, even after two thousand years.”
Tee stepped closer. “That’s why I need your help. Behind every great discovery is a team, a community, assistant—you name it. We can work together. I’ll be the student and listen—you can take the credit.”
“I will not allow you to disgrace our name,” Aven said firmly.
It was true—the Vergants had already been disgraced before, thanks to Severin or Drevarus, an apprentice who had caused the Second Apocalypse. Vergants had been hidden from the modern world, shrouded in myths and fairy tales.
Tee confronted Aven, staring into his eyes.
“The things you said were true. I am a horrible person. But I’m begging you to help me. I will obey. I want to be better. Do you know what it’s like to have everyone call you the destroyer, destined to ruin the world? I never asked for this! Please, let me do something good before I die.”
She knelt.
“Please, help me change my fate. Let me do something good…please help me find a cure. I know this is my destiny.”
Seeing her on her knees, Aven felt compassion and nodded. Tee shot to her feet, smiling. Aven found her sudden joy suspicious, but set it aside.
“You can tag along and learn what you can. Still, I am impressed with how quickly you mastered basic verging. Hana took so long, yet look at you. Perhaps you are a prodigy?”
Engel added, “Aven hath a favored one, for she is of the modern world.”
Tee had no interest in becoming an apprentice or elder—but she would need to learn much to find the cure. She also didn’t care who the hell that Hana person was.