Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 7) - Chapter 47 - Like Schrödinger and Schrödinger’s Cat Both

You… survived.

Xavier hovered in space, a planet looming below him with buildings so tall some stretched out of its atmosphere. His gaze settled on the top of the tallest tower and the glass dome that was its roof.

The third unfolding had just concluded. The Spirit of Time’s voice was filled with awe. The beautiful woman stared at him in a way he hadn’t seen before. Lips parted, eyes wide.

Xavier inclined his head. I did. He sighed inwardly. But it isn’t enough.

The woman balked. Not enough? Your death was guaranteed and in that unfolding you survived! Should you not be rejoicing?

Xavier frowned with a tilt of his head. I told you I would survive, he replied, matter-of-factly.

The Spirit of Time looked away. She shut her eyes and the sound of her long sigh echoed about Xavier’s skull.

Xavier couldn’t help but smirk. The woman was right—he should rejoice at this development. The third and final unfolding had been a success. Once again, Xavier had figured out a way to avoid “certain” death.

But he’d been inside the body of the version of himself that had survived. He’d felt what had happened to the man. While Xavier lacked a window into the man’s thoughts, he’d still felt the damage that had happened to his mind.

To every part of him.

The third unfolding of Xavier Collins had lived, yes. But he wasn’t in any state to fight. He’d used so much Soul Energy that he would now be suffering from an acute soul sickness that would likely prevent him from casting any spells for a time—he would have to fly back down to the planet or use an item to get him somewhere else.

Not only that, he could only remain in space for so long in such a damaged state.

And he wouldn’t be able to do a damned thing to help Palini or defeat The Collector.

He’d be licking his wounds…

Survival was one thing. Thriving was another. Xavier couldn’t let that be him—not if there was another option.

Perhaps you expect too much of yourself, Xavier Collins. Even in victory you look displeased. One must not only recognise their failures, but their successes.

I expect everything of myself. Xavier waved at an empty bit of space in front of him. Besides, that was no victory.

Sometimes, survival alone is the victory.

Xavier shook his head. Survival isn’t enough. Not for me.

The Spirit of Time raised her chin. She looked as though she wanted to lecture him. Xavier had seen a similar look on many a woman’s face in the past. She opened her mouth, but seemed to think better of it, as all she released was a sigh.

Perhaps you have the right of it. Either way, our time has come to an end. I cannot perform a fourth unfolding. Not here. The woman raised a hand, her fingers moving as though she were touching something—though it was nothing Xavier could see. The walls of reality are more volatile than I anticipated. She paused. I will give you a moment to think before I leave. As much time as I am able.

Xavier inclined his head in a bow. Thank you, Spirit of Time. I greatly appreciate your help.

The woman smiled. You may call me Anhelina, if you wish.

Xavier blinked, surprised, and returned the smile. Anhelina it is, then.

He remained there, hovering in the air, and turned his attention inward. That final unfolding may not have been everything he’d wished it had been, but the Spirit of Time—Anhelina—was right. It was a success.

It gave him an incredible amount of information. It showed him exactly how his energies and will interacted with the foreign Soul Energy.

He replayed the entire memory of the unfolding a little over a hundred times, focusing on every little detail. This also allowed him to strengthen the different pathways that lit up when he controlled foreign Soul Energy.

Then, he created a simulation in his mind based on the new information he possessed.

Again and again, he practiced. Over and over, until there was nothing more that he could do but dismiss the Spirit of Time and start rolling toward his future.

When he told Anhelina that he was ready, the spirit bowed her head. I imagine I will see you again soon enough, Xavier Collins. For what it is worth, I wish you luck.

She disappeared in an instant. Time rolled forward once more. If there had been colour in space, it would have flowed back into the area around him. As it was, the shift was something he felt rather than saw.

Xavier’s body and mind acted swiftly to the situation. For the entire time he’d been inside that frozen space, he’d experienced the pain of the Soul Energy ripping out from his heart. An eternal moment of agony that stretched and stretched.

That agony did not cease. It blossomed. But it did not blossom for long.

Xavier did not allow it.

He burned Reality Energy. Having learnt as much as he could from the third unfolding, he did not burn it all. Only half.

The risk was clear—he didn’t truly know if it would be enough. If he burned every drop he possessed. If he did things exactly as he had in the third unfolding, his survival would be guaranteed.

This course of action guaranteed nothing.

At the same time, Xavier pulled energy from his soul.

In the third unfolding, it was the abundant use of his Soul Energy that had served to harm him the most. Soul sickness was a serious thing to suffer from and difficult to come back from. He couldn’t allow himself to be in such a state. Once he survived this, he intended to take the fight back to The Collector.

He intended to kill The Collector—once and for all.

And yet paradoxically Xavier had decided to use more Soul Energy than the third unfolding version of him had, an action that would weaken him perhaps twice as severely.

An ungodly amount of power was unleashed through his body, mind, and spirit. He harnessed that power without hesitation and used it to manipulate the dense ball of foreign Soul Energy ripping through him.

Just as before, he was not conditioned to wield such power—even if he’d burned half as much Reality Energy, it was still too much.

Xavier grabbed hold of the foreign Soul Energy with his greatly empowered will and wrapped tendrils of his own Soul Energy around the explosion. But unlike in the third unfolding, he did not push at the energies—he pulled at them.

The foreign Soul Energy wasn’t stopped. Its flow did not reverse. It was not sent back through the portal. Instead, its movement was quickened.

It wreaked havoc through his body.

Yet the energy was no longer an explosion. The energies did not push outward in a sphere of pain and power. Instead, Xavier’s will and manipulation transformed the Soul Energy into a narrow beam that cut a very specific course.

Straight for Xavier’s own soul.

When replaying the memory of the third unfolding over and over again and focusing upon every possible detail his spiritual sense could interpret, Xavier had discovered something important—when his Soul Energy pushed against the foreign Soul Energy, it interacted with it in an unexpected way.

The energy signatures spread.

Some of his own Soul Energy became contaminated with the signature of the foreign Soul Energy. This contaminated energy was something the other version of himself lost control over. But his own Soul Energy contaminated the foreign Soul Energy at a significantly larger rate. Xavier suspected the reason for that was because there was an intention, a will, beyond his own energies, where the foreign energy had become nothing more than a destructive force.

Xavier had inspected the interaction with fascination, knowing he’d uncovered something significant.

So as that narrow beam of energy cut toward Xavier’s soul it wasn’t simply wreaking havoc, it was being transformed. Xavier’s mouth opened in a wordless, soundless scream of agony as power and pain coursed through him.

The opposing energies fought for dominance, and while much of the energy inside the dense beam was transformed on its path to his soul, a good portion escaped his influence, inflicting vast amount of agonising damage.

But when the first bits of Soul Energy he’d transformed did reach his soul—something that took the merest fraction of a second yet was an eternity to Xavier as he’d anticipated what this would mean in his own mind for what felt like eons—his soul accepted the transformed energies without hesitation.

The explosion of Soul Energy that was meant to kill him instead filled his soul to the brim. Xavier’s living soul became empowered like never before. The power he now possessed was immense.

But the energy did not stop. It kept flowing.

There was so much more than he’d thought.

A weaker soul’s walls would have crumbled and broken attempting to take on so much energy. As it was, Xavier’s soul had been hardened by the sacrifice of countless other souls along his journey. His spell, Soul Harden, had been used judiciously, and his soul was strong enough to hold far more energy than he currently possessed.

Even so, it was too much for him.

Far too much.

Though there was far more Soul Energy than Xavier had expected, he’d already known there would be more than he could hold—even if he hadn’t known just how much.

Running the simulations in his mind, he had planned for this. Practiced.

He knew what to do.

The energy did not consume him. Did not crumble or break or explode his soul. Nor did it go to waste. He siphoned off the excess energy, flowing it through his channels to heal and reinforce them.

Xavier did not stop there—he couldn’t stop there. The Soul Energy was filling his soul faster than he could use it for any one thing. He infused the soul energy into his muscles, his bones, his organs, skin, and blood. He sent it up to his brain where it pooled and further empowered every process and pathway inside it, strengthening his powers of concentration to new heights.

The process of strengthening his brain was the hardest—he had to get granular, splitting his mind into thousands of separate pieces, each pinpointing certain parts of the brain that he wished to strengthen the connections between, and intentionally ignoring parts he didn’t want strengthened, parts that he didn’t see as serving him.

The Reality Energy he’d burned still lingered. Not even a full second had passed since time had started rolling forward. That Reality Energy helped him control the flood of energy and get a handle on his newfound power, but even with that bolstering him it was hard to fathom the depths of his consciousness.

The damage to his heart was healed. The damage the foreign Soul Energy had cut through him was healed. The agony that had suffused his body and mind lifted like morning fog giving way to an unexpected bright, sunny day. The beam of Soul Energy continued to flow, but the damage it rent had become insignificant as he was able transform more and more of the stream faster, contaminating it with his signature almost the instant it came out of the portal.

Xavier had never used Soul Energy in such a way before. He knew from the cultivation practices he’d performed that there were ways to make energy permanently change one’s body, mind, and spirit—but Soul Energy had never been something he had used for this.

Once Xavier had healed the damage, strengthened his energy channels, and infused every inch of his body and mind with Soul Energy, he found the foreign Soul Energy still flowed through the void portal.

The power of this explosion—it could have killed me ten, twenty, maybe a hundred times over…

What in the Greater Universe had The Collector been preparing this for?

This was the farthest he’d gone in the simulations. He could try to push more Soul Energy into different parts of him, but he sensed he was not ready for that—he had already done more than he should have. There was a newfound strength, but that strength felt almost… volatile.

Xavier could siphon the excess energy away. Push it from his soul. Let it flow into the space around him.

Such a waste…

He hesitated. The energies continued to fill his soul. Like an overfilled balloon he knew it couldn’t handle much more.

Further indecision would only cause a catastrophe.

I have to risk it.

Xavier pushed the excess Soul Energy out through his energy channels. His mind was already split, working on several things at once that were keeping him alive. He split his mind a further four times, each new part focusing on the energies he’d released.

The Soul Energy went in different directions down his channels, toward four places.

The parts of him that remained shattered.

Each of the four streams of Soul Energy was more than he’d ever possessed at once before. And the streams of energy he siphoned from his soul kept going. More and more power flowed toward the four damaged parts of him.

There appeared to be no end to what was coming through the void portal.

The Soul Energy was an abundance he couldn’t imagine ever holding again.

Maybe when I’m A Grade…

One stream went to his shattered Spirit Core.

Another to his Willpower Core.

The third to his Speed Core.

And the final stream his Intelligence Core.

Xavier made this decision by pure intuition. He’d probed the shattered cores with Soul Energy on more than one occasion over the past decade. Not once had it had a measurable effect. But always, there had been a voice inside telling him this could be done. That the cores could be fixed.

Not all broken things must remain broken.

There is always a way. There has to be.

Ideally, he would do this in a controlled environment. He would send Soul Energy to one shattered core at a time, not all four at once.

But since when had any true breakthrough Xavier experienced been in an ideal, controlled environment? Yes, there had been plenty of breakthroughs in the Roving Seed Base—but the initial breakthroughs that made what he and others had done there possible had come from moments like this.

Moments where he was pushed beyond measurable limits. Moments where he took a chance.

The intuition that had pushed him toward this action made what happened next feel oddly natural. It took all the newfound power he possessed, and more Soul Energy than he imagined holding again for a very, very long time. But as that Soul Energy touched each shattered core, Xavier made it flow in patterns that had long became familiar.

They were the same patterns that transformed Celestial Energy into the respective four different energies of the cores he was trying to repair.

Soul Energy was not Celestial Energy. It was a type of energy Xavier understood the origins and uses of the least. The rational, thinking part of his mind looked in awe at the decision he’d made, knowing that if it went wrong that Soul Energy would rip through him if he lost control over—regardless of it being his Soul Energy or not.

More than enough power remained to cause his death. And still more was coming.

Death is not an option.

All Xavier could do was watch and hope that his spirit—his Immortal Soul, he supposed—possessed insight he lacked. That its intuition was based on more than hope.

The Soul Energy moved in four distinct, powerful cycling patterns around the shattered cores. At first, this appeared to do nothing at all. The pieces of the shattered cores remained as inert as they had been since the Universal Pressure back in the Arakashinai Queen’s chambers had broken them apart.

Xavier couldn’t take a deep breath or grit his teeth. Couldn’t clench his fists, tap his foot, or impatiently flap his wings. These processes happened too fast for him to even stop the wordless, silent scream of his open mouth.

As he observed this all happen, he felt trapped in a pocket of eternity. A moment that bore the weight of so much of his attention that it stretched beyond the bindings of time. A moment of sheer and utter uncertainty the likes of which he’d never experienced.

He felt like Schrödinger and Schrödinger’s cat both. This moment was the box. The next was the box’s opening. Only then would he observe his own fate.

Would he be dead or alive?

His hold over the foreign Soul Energy wavered as more of his concentration shifted toward the four parts of his mind trying to repair his shattered cores. Pain rent through his heart once more as the narrow beam of energy was transformed slower and slower. The pain did nothing to inhibit his concentration. He compartmentalised it. Even so, if he lost the balance of everything he was trying to do it would mean his end.

As the pain cut a line through his heart toward his soul, it was not the pain itself that threatened to overtake him and falter his concentration, but the panic that coursed through his sympathetic nervous system.

His rational mind retreated, his emotions coming to the fore, trying to take control, trying to stop this foolish choice from killing him.

Death is not an option!

Xavier felt this shift within him and made a choice.

In an instant, he slipped into that pure, perfect state of calm he’d cultivated in his training, and the panic abated as swiftly as it came. How he managed this under the circumstances he had no time to question. It must have been a consequence of the strengthening he’d just undergone.

The burned Reality Energy was almost spent.

But before it ran out, something shifted and changed within him. He felt it move before his spiritual sense observed it. The time between the sensation and the observation was miniscule, and yet that change shifted a heavy weight he didn’t know was inside him.

The pieces of his Spirit Core—the first core all Denizens uncovered—had twitched. Then, he felt another heavy weight shift, both similar and completely unlike the first.

The shattered components of his Willpower Core.

Two more shifts followed: His Speed and Intelligence Cores catching up.

Tortuously slowly, yet paradoxically faster than the flap of a hummingbird’s wings, the pieces did more than simply twitch—they moved and came together, forming around the four streams of flowing Soul Energy that cycled over and over. When the shattered pieces touched the Soul Energy what was previously inert to Xavier’s spiritual sense glowed so brightly it threatened to blind him to everything else.

The Soul Energy infused its power into the components of his original cores.

Bit by bit the pieces reformed. Bit by bit what was once shattered became whole.

All the while, the foreign Soul Energy again wreaked havoc to his insides. His vision blurred. The excruciating agony he’d compartmentalised broke out of its box. The equilibrium of his perfect state of calm became unbalanced.

Little by little, the broken parts of Xavier were being fixed, but his control was slipping away…

A question had remained in the fore and now became burned into his brain as the space around him darkened.

Will I be dead or alive?