Chapter 13: The Forge of Echo
My third prison was one of cold steel and hot blood.
Faelan, my new host, grew up not among papyri and enchantments, but in the mud and fury of a warrior tribe. The days were no longer a parade of luxuries and politics, but a brutal cycle of hunting, training, and border skirmishes.
Through his eyes, I saw swords collide, felt the impact of a wooden shield against his bones, and smelled the coppery scent of blood spilled on the frozen earth.
But this new violent existence was, for me, a backdrop. My real battle was fought in the stillness of the night, in the sanctuary of its shadow.
Every night, after Faelan's exhausted body fell into sleep, my work began. It was no longer a struggle for humanity or a simple exploration of power. It was an act of conceptual engineering. He had a plan, forged in the revelation of the seven seconds. A plan that required the creation of an impossibility: a decoy for a god.
My laboratory was darkness. My tools, my own essence. My goal: to create an echo. A shadow clone that could fool the System.
The first attempts were an absolute failure. The process was a form of conceptual self-mutilation. I would concentrate, searching in the depths of my being for the energetic signature that the System recognized, the essence of "Canis Lykaon," and try to wrest it.
'It was like trying to rip out my own soul.'
The pain was not physical. It was an existential dissonance, a fracture in my consciousness that left me shaking and disoriented. I managed to separate a wisp of darkness, but it was inert, formless, and dissolved back into my being in a matter of seconds, leaving behind a phantom pain that lasted for hours.
I realized that my approach was too brutal. I couldn't tear a part of myself away. The chain was not tied to a piece of my power, but to my entire identity.
So, I changed tactics. Not strength, but subtlety. Like a snake shedding its skin, I didn't have to lose a part of myself, but leave a perfect copy of my exterior.
I called this new technique "exfoliation." It was an arduous process, which required absolute concentration. Night after night, I would sit in the darkness of the forest, within the perimeter of my leash, and secrete an infinitesimal layer of my essence.
It was like sweating dark. Small specks of my being came off, not with pain, but with immense effort. And then, the real task began: weaving them.
Using my will as a needle and thread, I began to weave these specks of essence into a coherent form. It was like building a statue grain by grain of sand. I failed hundreds of times. Forms collapsed, energy dissipated. But with each failure, he learned.
I learned the right tension, the necessary density, the way to imbue the shell with the resonance of a Longinus without giving it a true consciousness.
While I was immersed in this Herculean task, the world around me began to burn.
At first, they were just whispers in the shadows. Echoes of fury that came from distant kingdoms. But then, it became a scream.
One night, as I was weaving my echo, the night sky was torn apart. A fissure of golden light opened in the blackness, and from it fell spears of celestial fire. In another direction, the crimson horizon of the Underworld seemed to boil, casting a hellish glow that stained the clouds with blood.
The Great War of the Factions had broken out.
From my limited perspective, tied to this forgotten corner of the world, war was an abstract and cosmic event. He saw no armies; I felt the shockwaves of its power.
The air was filled with new flavors: the metallic taste of holy power, the sulfurous taste of demonic magic, and the ozone flavor of the Fallen's lightning. The shadows, my domain, were no longer silent. Shouted.
They screamed with the echoes of souls being annihilated by the millions. He could feel the titanic battles being fought on planes of existence he could barely glimpse. I heard the roar of dragons, the singing of angelic choirs, and the war cries of demonic legions.
At first, I didn't care. It was background noise, an annoying distraction for my work. The gods and their children were having a tantrum. Pathetic.
But then, in the midst of the chaos, my calculating mind saw the truth.
I was watching a battle through the shadow of a high-flying bird, watching an angel with six wings of fire fight a demon in bone armor, when realization struck me with the force of a revelation.
The System. My jailer.
The Biblical God.
He was at the center of this storm. His attention, his power, his will... Everything was focused on this total war. He was fighting for the survival of his creation, his entire system on high alert, not to guard his prisoners, but to annihilate his enemies.
'My jailer... he's distracted.'
The realization was so profound, so electrifying, that I stopped my work for an instant. This was not a simple war. It was an opportunity. A once-in-a-a-eon opportunity.
The risk of my plan had always been detection. Cheating the System was one thing; to do so while its creator was watching was almost suicide. But now... Now the all-seeing eye was looking away.
The cosmic machinery was overloaded, its resources devoted to war. My blasphemous little conspiracy would go unnoticed under the din of colliding worlds.
A new urgency came over me. Patience was replaced by feverish precision. I redoubled my efforts.
Night after night, the forging continued. War raged in the background, an apocalyptic soundtrack to my act of silent creation. And finally, after years of work, I succeeded.
In the stillness of a night tinged with the glow of a distant celestial battle, the final form took consistency. Floating in front of me, there was a perfect replica. A smaller version of my essential core, a sphere of pulsating darkness that radiated the same signature of power, the same resonance of Longinus.
I touched it with my will. It was empty. Without mind. Without conscience. A shell.
'A perfect echo. A ghost for the network.'
I reabsorbed it, hiding it in the depths of my being, a key waiting for its lock. The job was done. The lure was ready. The distraction was perfect.
Now, all I needed was for my host to die.
I lay in the shadow of Faelan, a warrior who was now fighting increasingly desperate battles as the chaos of the Great War spread to deadly corners. I watched him, no longer like a prisoner watching his jailer, but like a conspirator watching the second hand of a clock.
I waited patiently, a predator watching the world burn, knowing, with absolute certainty, that my freedom was, at last, only a lifetime away.
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