The River Styx Water was tasteless, but an intense, bone-chilling cold spread through him the mont it touched his tongue. Jenkins took a few ragged breaths before breaking into a violent coughing fit. Pain radiated from the nerves in his stomach, spreading to every corner of his body as his muscles began to spasm uncontrollably.
"ow~"
Amidst his cat's worried cries, Jenkins, who had collapsed and was now convulsing on the floor, suddenly saw a vast black river flowing before him. From its eerily placid surface, a dense thicket of struggling arms reached futilely for the sky.
The vision lasted only a few seconds before disappearing, and the pain and discomfort slowly faded with it. Pushing himself up from the floor, Jenkins gasped for air, cold sweat streaming down his cheeks.
"Was that a normal side effect of the potion, or was it because it was about to expire?"
The next ti he saw Magic Miss, he was definitely going to ask her about it. For a mont there, he genuinely felt his [Undying Man] ability was about to activate, and the thought was utterly terrifying.
After writing down the final ability, [Perforr], and using the notebook for the third ti, the Series B Extraordinary item transford into nothing more than an ordinary, blank notebook. Fate hadn't played a cruel joke on him at this critical juncture. The [Perforr] ability successfully materialized before his eyes; he had actually beaten the odds and hit that 30.34% probability.
Once he possessed all five abilities, the five specks of colored light began to softly glow and drift toward one another. Just as Hathaway had once said, while [The Stage] maze-lock required no preparation to activate, its very existence would render its five constituent abilities completely inert.
Jenkins didn't even have ti to appreciate the uses of his new abilities before the five points of light converged. The golden [Storyteller] settled in the center, flanked by [Perforr] and [The Player] on either side. With [Construct Stage] at the bottom and [String-puller] at the top, they ford a perfect cross. The five vibrant specks of light abruptly faded to a dull gray, yet Jenkins sensed he could now control the maze-lock by activating all five abilities simultaneously.
"Isn't it done yet?"
He glanced back again at the machine, which was still humming. Chocolate owed in agreent.
With convenient items like the spiritual magnetite and an ability like [Real Illusion], there was no need for Jenkins to wait around. He considered his options for a mont, then used a few charms and a simple ritual to conceal the supernatural phenona in the room before leaving the church with his cat.
As he soared through the sky on the unicorn, the cat squird restlessly against his chest, only settling down after a gentle pat.
"The maze-lock..."
He ntally triggered the five converged points of light, and the five colors—gold, yellow, blue, red, and white—flashed in sequence. A vibrant cross composed of the lights materialized before him, and an inexplicable sense of fulfillnt washed over his heart.
"I will find Skryu Pompey behind the rock wall in the abandoned cetery on the outskirts of the city, where there is a black cat and an elderwood tree."
He murmured the words aloud, though the ability didn't actually alter reality through speech—voicing the sentence was rely a way to focus his intent. The mont the chained ability activated, the entire city transford into a "stage" before his eyes.
He could feel it—he could now freely manipulate events once governed by probability, transforming re chance into absolute certainty. By accumulating enough of these certainties, he could orchestrate his desired outco.
However, using this maze-lock consud a vast amount of spirit. The more he altered and the more outlandish the changes, the greater the spiritual cost. Conversely, if he manipulated familiar places and objects, and could justify the alterations with a plausible reason, the drain on his spirit would be significantly less.
That was why he had set the location in his own suburban cetery. Even though it involved a powerful Cursed Item, which made orchestrating a miracle more difficult, Jenkins had already concocted the perfect reason for Skryu Pompey to appear there.
He traversed the entire city from the sky, landing on a hill near the cetery. After moving nimbly through the woods to the entrance, he saw that the only snow left on the ground was in the shaded areas, and the groundskeeper's cottage had completely collapsed.
"Looks like I really missed it by a hair's breadth."
He recalled his search for the Bestowal here last week and couldn't help but sigh and shake his head. Seeing as the fight hadn't officially begun, he returned to the room in the church once more, but the machine was still whirring away.
While flying over the city monts ago, he had seen with perfect clarity the intense street battles raging below. Every second of hesitation now ant more harm for Nolan.
He waited another three minutes before deciding he could delay no longer. He also considered his current image in Pompey's eyes—that of an invincible foe. If he appeared now with a powerful new weapon, Pompey might just turn tail and run at the first sight of him.
So Jenkins decided against waiting. Instead, he would deliberately show himself and feign weakness. That way, the next ti they t—after he had his weapon—Pompey might be a little more confident and wouldn't be so quick to flee.
With that, he returned to the cetery entrance, took out his last piece of thousand-year-old elderwood heartwood, gritted his teeth, and plunged it deep into the soil before him.
"Hah~"
Reviving this was far more difficult than bringing an ordinary apple tree back to life. He wrapped his hand firmly around the heartwood, sensing its faint, lingering life force as he channeled the torrent of his own spirit into it.
As ti passed, the staff of wood grew taller and thicker, stretching toward the dark sky in defiance of the bleak wind. Elderwood is a deciduous shrub, or at best a small tree, and doesn't naturally grow very tall. But under the influence of Jenkins's power, it was now transforming into the mightiest specin it could possibly beco.
The mont the first twig sprouted, the cat on his shoulder gave a soft cry. Its fur shifted to pure black, and with an effortless leap, it scrambled onto the rapidly thickening branches.
"eooow~"
At the cat's drawn-out cry, a canopy of leaves and flower buds materialized above its head, sheltering it from the elents. In that precise mont—with the cetery, the black cat, and the elderwood all in place—his [The Observer] ability flared to life.
"Am I... creating fate? Or fulfilling it?"
He hadn't quite understood Miss Broniaons's instruction to "realize" Miss Audrey's divination, but now, a profound thought took root in his mind. For a fleeting instant, he felt he could once again see the dense, interwoven threads of fate.
"Diviners improve themselves through divination, and a successful divination of a key event brings them closer to fate... If a divination doesn't succeed, then you use your own hands to make it succeed!"
The conclusion struck him as absurd, but on further reflection, it made a certain kind of sense. Mortals could never grasp the true nature of fate; what they called "divination" only ever revealed a single fragnt of what was to co.
So, as long as that fragnt manifested—whether through coincidence or by the diviner's own hand—that, too, was simply another part of fate's grand design.
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