THEOS

Cyzicus wasted no time in leading him to his personal stash. The massive and well-lit room underneath the castle was nearly empty save for a single storage ring floating next to a plain-looking podium. Before Luke could step inside, though, the emperor held out his hand and stopped him in his tracks.

“This is where I keep all my best stuff. Millenia worth of spoils and wealth. It’s better guarded than near anything in the capital,” he said, his voice uncharacteristically grave.

“You don’t keep everything in your storage ring?” Luke asked.

“And give all my life’s work to any fool who happens to kill me?” Cyzicus scoffed. “No, my ring just contains the essentials and some extra in case of an emergency. More than enough to help me survive even the most dire of circumstances, but not all my wealth. This, however”—he stretched his hand out toward the ring—“will go to my heirs. Even had the Rebel succeeded in defeating me and taken this castle, none of it would ever have been hers. The slightest movement beyond this step will teleport the ring away to Lord Hermes. He is oathsworn to safeguard and deliver its contents to the people I’ve entrusted them to on my passing.” Then, before Luke could ask any more questions, a dagger appeared in Cyzicus’s hands. He stabbed himself in the palm and let his blood drip onto the white marble floor.

Without a visible mechanism, the red seeped into the stone, disappearing without a trace. The sound of clanking metal echoed throughout the chamber, and Luke watched, stunned, as a veritable army of suits of silver armor shimmered to life in neat ranks around the ring, each of them armed with identical shields and spears. Suddenly, the size of the room made sense.

“Move,” Cyzicus commanded, and instantly they parted. Stepping in perfect sync, they formed a straight path between them and the podium.

A hint of pride in his step, the emperor marched toward the ring. Feeling a mixture of anticipation and giddiness, Luke followed him, eager to see what Cyzicus had in store for him.

Luke already had a sizable collection of Warrior- and Hero-tier artifacts from killing the Rebel. Most of it was decent, but very little of it was what Luke would think of as high-quality. At least not anymore, knowing what he did about what was possible. He’d found Tyrisa’s lack of wealth strange at first but reasoned that waging war against an entire island couldn’t have been cheap. She had likely spent or given away most of her wealth to indulge her rebellion, however short-lived. Now that he saw this, though, he wondered if maybe she too had made arrangements with some god to pass her holdings down to her heirs.

Luke shook his head as row after row of empty suits of armor turned on their heels at his passing, each one ready to attack at a moment’s notice in case he tripped some invisible alarm. He’d thought he knew what wealth looked like, but as they made their way past the ring’s defenses, he realized he might have been too quick to jump to conclusions. Hero-tier cultivators lived for millennia. Cyzicus alone had lived longer than Earth’s calendar had years. Much of that time was spent ruling what was practically an entire continent.

Of course he doesn’t walk around carrying everything he owns on his finger.

Mind freshly blown, thoughts of what lay in that ring had his mind awash with ideas. Ideas he suspected would remain just that, as he doubted Cyzicus would give him a complete inventory.

Still, even among the same tier, there were differences in workmanship between artifacts. Which was what he was concerned with, and the reason Cyzicus had brought him here in the first place. Things like physical durability, mana efficiency, and the potency of abilities came down to the skill of the craftsmen who made the tool as much as, if not more than, the tier of mana that powered it.

Maximus was a great example of that. The sword was still a Warrior-tier weapon, but it had no problem slicing through Hero-tier flesh. Not to mention the host of other abilities it provided. The doubling of every stat, the inherit mana storage, along with the fact that it acted as a conduit of Luke’s energy, made it better than any other Warrior-tier artifact Luke had ever heard of, let alone possessed.

Honestly, it was superior to most Hero-tier objects he had, too. Maybe not in every aspect—Maximus couldn’t hold a candle to the Limitless Thunder Bow’s sheer destructive power, for example—but it more than made up for it with its versatility and ability to harvest mana from the recently killed.

And while Luke carried little hope of finding anything even remotely as useful as his named and bound sword, he also knew that Cyzicus kept his best stuff out of his public merit exchange. Some of the items in there had been created by Cyzicus and were quite good, but most of it had been made and sold to the empire by warriors throughout the realm—warriors who had no hope of advancing to the next stage, had given up on their cultivation, and instead spent their time pursuing the crafts.

The artifacts they created weren’t bad, per se, but they couldn’t really compare to what Cyzicus could do, either. Not when the emperor had spent millennia honing his skills compared to their centuries, or more often decades. As for the contents of the ring, maybe some of them had been crafted by beings even higher than the Hero tier.

“So, what exactly do you need?” Cyzicus placed his still-bloody hand on the podium, and at the gesture, the ring flew off onto a finger on his other hand. Cyzicus dripped another drop of blood onto it, binding it to him so that he could access its contents.

“Umm . . . A full set of Mortal-tier armor. The best you have.” The words had barely left Luke’s mouth when the ring flashed and a mannequin, dressed head to toe in golden armor, appeared in front of them.

It wasn’t the most ornate set Luke had seen, but it was regal. Lacking any sort of patterns or insignias, the thing almost looked more like the Iron Man armor than any he had seen on Theos before. Only the red cape and the Spartan-esque helmet set it apart from the stuff of comic books. Even its construction was so perfect that Luke wasn’t even sure how he would go about getting into it.

But holy shit, this is awesome. I want it, I want it, I want it, he repeated over and over in his head. Outwardly, though, he remained stoic and eyed the suit of armor with a critical gaze.

Cyzicus quirked his eyebrow at that before shrugging. “I’ll be honest, this isn’t the most practical mortal armor I have. Truthfully, I’m not even sure a mortal could wear it. It’s much too heavy. At your level, though, it shouldn’t hamper your movements or slow your flight. It’s enchanted with self-repair, environmental resistance, and durability. So it should offer adequate protection against the caliber of attack you can expect in the tournament. I wouldn’t rely on it saving you from a head-on attack, though. No mortal armor will do that.”

“Environmental resistance?” Luke asked.

“Heat won’t cook you, the cold won’t bother you as much, water will slide off, and lightning won’t zap you quite as hard. It won’t stand up to protracted energy attacks, though, so you’ll need to dodge. The quality of the enchantments is about as good as you can get, but it’s still a Mortal-tier armor set, so the amount of mana you can feed it without blowing them isn’t that high. So watch out for that.”

Luke nodded. “It’s . . . nice. A little pretentious, though, don’t you think?”

“HA,” the emperor laughed. “You wield a golden blade. The time for seeming humble is long gone. Besides, a little ego isn’t misplaced in those of us who dare reach for divinity. Cultivators are many things, but not humble. And at an event like the tournament, this much won’t be out of place. It’s not out of place on the battlefield, either, but you should wear something of a higher tier when your life’s on the line.”

Token resistance given, Luke nodded eagerly. “Sounds good to me. What do you have for Warrior-tier shields?”

The ring flashed once again, and a golden shield appeared in the air in front of them. Unlike the armor, though, it wasn’t unmarked—a menacing lion head stared back at Luke, its mouth agape, seemingly in the middle of a roar.

“This one is decent,” Cyzicus said, sliding his own hand into the grip. A moment later, a red bubble flickered to life around him, almost like he had activated a protective talisman. “The added coverage means it isn’t as strong as if the entire defense was dedicated to the metal. The bubble can take one or two hits before it pops, but you can recharge it as many times as you want. It’s . . . pretty mana-intensive, though and the shield can’t hold any, either. Something tells me, though, that that isn’t going to be a problem for you.”

Luke nodded. Mana, indeed, would not be a problem for him at all. His stats meant that he was sitting pretty close to the theoretical maximum of the Warrior tier when it came to his reserves. Reserves that were doubled thanks to his sword. Meaning that altogether, he should have more than twice the mana of everyone he would be competing against.

“Anything else?” Cyzicus asked.

“Yeah, actually. Do you have anything I can use in the midrange? Like a spear that shoots off energy blasts or something.”

“What happened to the sword I gave you? That should serve you fine.” Cyzicus frowned.

“I lost it,” Luke lied. It had been in his inventory when he had killed the Rebel and had remained there when the others brought him back to the castle. He had wanted to use it more than once, but without a way to explain how he had recovered it, that had proven impossible. At least without exposing the fact that he had an inventory or something. The fact that Cyzicus didn’t know wasn’t strange, though. Considering that his fiancée had just passed at the time, Luke would have been more surprised if he had noticed that Luke was walking around with one gold blade instead of two.

“Tch. That was a really good sword, you know? It may not seem like it, but making mana projections sharp enough to cut is hard. Doubly so when you want them to work with Mortal-tier mana.”

“Oh . . . Don’t you just need to enchant another sword the same way to get the same effect?”

Cyzicus looked personally affronted at that question. “No. No, you can’t just squiggle the same lines on another sword and get an exact copy of a masterpiece. There’s a million different steps you have to complete perfectly to get a result that good. If even one of them isn’t performed with the utmost precision, the mana projection turns dull. Or maybe the distance it can travel before dissipating halves. Or maybe it doesn’t contain enough oomph to actually cut anything thicker than a chicken’s neck. I would assume that the fact that not everyone is carrying a weapon that versatile would clue you in to its true rarity.”

Luke scratched the back of his head. His own knowledge of enchanting was nearly nonexistent, other than the fact that you carved glyphs into objects to do it. A consequence of everyone condemning any action that didn’t improve your cultivation level. Wasting time on secondary pursuits while you hadn’t reached the limits of your potential was practically sacrilege to cultivators. That, and plenty of people had weapons that blasted something out of one end. Thinking back, he realized sharp things were rare, but gouts of flame, lightning, bolts of force, and arrows were common enough. Still, there wasn’t anything he could do about it now except feel glad that he hadn’t actually lost the weapon and guilty that he had lied to Cyzicus about it.

Maybe I’ll take a trip back to that castle and find it later. I’m going to outgrow it pretty soon, but maybe I can give it to some up-and-coming cultivator? Maybe my boots, too—it’s not like I need them anymore.

And once this tournament is done, I should break the mold and really learn some of this stuff, too. With the Seed I can constantly improve my Arcana, so I’ll never really hit my limit until I ascend. Which is going to start holding me back in other ways if I don’t make the time.

Cyzicus stared at him a moment longer before shaking his head. The ring flashed one more time, though, and another golden blade, nearly identical to the one Cyzicus had given him all those months ago, appeared in his hand.

“Here. It’s similar to the last one. More crude, but you’ll find it a tad more powerful. Mortals won’t be able to use it like you did the old one, but it won’t be a problem for you.”

“Thanks.” Luke nodded gratefully, ultimately deciding not to point out that he had asked for a spear and not another sword. It was probably for the best, anyway—he was decent with a spear, but swords were practically his bread and butter at this point.

“Anything else?”

Luke shook his head. “I’m good for the rest. Thanks for all this,” he said earnestly, even as his storage ring glowed and greedily squirreled it all away.

“Don’t mention it. The reward I get for sponsoring you, even with your current rank in the tournament, is more than enough to pay for all your training and equipment. And, uhh, I’ll say this now, because it won’t mean much later. If you don’t advance any farther in the tournament, don’t feel guilty. I don’t know what the earlier stages were like, but I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s a miracle for you to have come this far. Those that do are usually either disciples of truly powerful sects, like Jason, or direct descendants of gods, wielding both destructive and powerful bloodlines and who knows what kind of techniques.”

A vision of Theseus cutting down entire chunks of the forest with blades of water and Ella commanding constructs of rainbow light flashed through his mind.

It kinda was a miracle, wasn’t it?

“Thanks . . . Hey, did you know I looked like Poseidon?”

“By look like, do you mean look nearly identical to him? If so, yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You didn't know?”

“Not until Heracles told me.”

“Strange, but it happens,” Cyzicus said, leading him out of the room.