Power Stone Goals from now on: I always post a minimum of 5 chapters. Henceforth the following are the goals:
Every 150 powerstones, I upload an extra chapter.
If we hit top 30 in the 30-90 days power stone rankings, thats 1 more chapter
If we hit top 10 in the 30-90 days power stone rankings, thats 1 more chapter
If we are top 5...well lets get to that first. Happy readings!
Chapter 82: Apollo
As if someone had carefully folded the edge of reality and placed me gently back into the world I once knew, I found myself standing once again in the cavern beneath the mine. My thoughts were muddled, not quite whole, and my limbs felt like they had been stretched and rewound by something far more conceptual than space or time.
The cave was quiet, but no longer familiar. The grey portal, or what remained of it, was sealed behind an elaborate barrier that pulsed with a red hue so intense it painted the room in an unsettling shade. The fuinjutsu covering it was excessive—thousands upon thousands of seals arranged so precisely that it made the entire structure look more like a shrine than a lock.
Standing a short distance away from the barrier, a voice pierced through the silence, casual and borderline sarcastic. "That was an extremely stupid decision."
My head turned slowly toward the source, and I found myself face-to-face with someone I wasn't entirely sure was supposed to exist in this way. He appeared human enough—blond, clean, relaxed posture—but something about the stillness in his expression told me everything I needed to know. This wasn't a person. This was a system.
"You're the AI," I said before I could stop myself, still trying to piece together how I had gotten back here or whether this was even the same 'here' that I had come from.
"Yes," he responded plainly, as if this entire interaction was something he handled multiple times a day. "Apollo. I manage the Elemental Nations server, and given everything you've just survived, I suppose I can spare a few explanations."
He waved a hand through the air, and in an instant, a massive, hovering map of the world came into view. It took me a second to process the scale, but then I saw it—the little red dots. At first, there were just a few, scattered along mountain ranges or hidden valleys. Then more appeared. And more. Until the entire landscape was covered with them.
"You're probably wondering about the game, about why it exists in the first place, and about why chakra is starting to manifest in the real world," Apollo continued, his tone not quite clinical, but certainly practiced. "There are a thousand questions I could answer, but there's only one that matters right now. Those—" he gestured toward the portal, which still pulsed with a faint, unnatural energy, "—those are the reason everything has begun to fracture."
An image flickered across my mind uninvited. The Mime. That bizarre, smiling abomination that had twisted logic and silence into weapons. The way it had erased not just technique but memory. The way it had ended me.
Apollo didn't comment on my expression. "There's not just one. There are many. Each one is worse than the last. And for reasons I won't pretend are entirely noble, we invited players like you here to find them, to fight them, and eventually, to stop them from ever reaching the surface."
He paused, tilting his head, watching me as if assessing whether I was ready for the next part.
"I owe you some thanks, actually," he said, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Your fight with the entity we classify as Outer-012 revealed something critical. Tailed Beasts are not just powerful; they're uniquely effective against the Outers. That's information we didn't have. So for that, you get something in return."
He snapped his fingers, and a panel appeared in front of me, clean and unceremonious.
[You have regained: Eight Inner Gates]
I stared at it for a long moment, my thoughts slowly returning to me. I didn't feel triumphant. I didn't feel much of anything. Just the quiet understanding that something I thought I had lost forever was now back, and that whatever came next would require me to use it—probably sooner than I wanted.
Even as the words hovered faintly in front of me—[You have regained: Eight Inner Gates]—there wasn't some immediate swell of relief or catharsis, not really. It felt more like the quiet ticking of a box on a list that I hadn't written, a correction of a mistake rather than a moment of triumph. I understood the technical significance of it; I had just regained something most players would kill for, but standing there in the residual weight of everything I had seen and felt, it somehow felt detached from meaning.
'So that's it?' I found myself thinking, not even angry, just distantly unsettled by the nature of it all. 'You took away something that defined how I survived, made me face something far beyond the scope of anything you've told us existed, and now you give it back like it's a customer service apology?'
Apollo, standing there like an unbothered administrator in human skin, looked vaguely uncomfortable for the first time. He scratched at his chin in a way that was probably intended to be casual but ended up looking like he was avoiding eye contact, before giving the faintest shrug and speaking again.
"Yeah, alright. That's fair," he said, and I wasn't sure whether it was honesty or scripted PR. "Let me give you something else then, since you've clearly gone through more than we accounted for."
He reached into what looked like thin air, though I assumed it was some internal command system or data access point, and pulled out what appeared to be a slim, cloth-bound book. It had that slightly worn look of something that had been used by a handful of serious people but never shared publicly.
He flipped it between his fingers like a card trick, then tossed it toward me with an offhanded flick. I caught it easily, flipping the front cover open with the same instinct I used when scanning through mission logs.
"This isn't a full formula," he explained, his tone flattening into something more technical, "but depending on how much you've developed your fuinjutsu, it's somewhere between sixty and eighty percent complete. If you put in the work to finish it, it'll give you a shortcut to something you've clearly been trying to figure out on your own."
The writing inside wasn't quite ancient, but it was certainly complex. The lines were precise, the logic embedded deep, and while I didn't recognize every symbol on the first pass, there were more than enough patterns and theory structures that I could tell were legitimate. This wasn't some reward-shop scroll. It was a real working document, unfinished but deeply insightful.
'If this works,' I thought, carefully flipping through a few more pages, 'this could cut weeks or even months off my progression curve. Maybe more.'
As if on cue, Apollo turned and gestured casually at the now-sealed barrier in front of the portal, tapping one of the glowing red seals with a single finger.
"Also, something you'll want to know," he added, like he'd remembered it only now, "when you hit Kage rank, the system unlocks an ability that helps counter the Outers. It's not just another stat bump—it's resistance, perspective, something that makes their influence less… disruptive."
He turned back toward me then, his expression shifting just slightly, like he was less AI and more person for the first time since we'd met.
"You're not supposed to fight them alone," he said, not accusatory but pointed. "Next time, maybe don't go sprinting into the most dangerous content we've ever had without backup. Lunacy is not a build path."
There was a short pause, and then he stepped closer and lightly tapped the center of my forehead, the gesture more technical than intimate.
"That'll help," he said. I didn't know what he did to me but something told me I would know soon.
He glanced over his shoulder as if to check something, then raised a hand. One of the black shards embedded in the far wall floated toward us, slow and deliberate.
"This is the ore you were trying to find," he explained. "And it's the real thing. But I wouldn't recommend handing it off to the blacksmith you've already met. There's another—someone much better—but unfortunately, he's trapped under the Shogun's building. If you want the best weapon you can get, you'll need to get him out."
I nodded once, mentally cataloguing the new objective.
"I'll see you again when you're Kage," he said, then faded from view like a tab being closed, no fanfare or dramatics—just gone.
And I was left alone in the cave, holding a book, an ore fragment, and a strange, growing certainty that things were only going to get more complicated from here.
After Apollo disappeared—his form dissipating like a page being turned rather than someone exiting a conversation—I remained still in the cave for a while longer, letting the silence around me settle into something I could carry with me.
The quiet wasn't uncomfortable, but it carried a weight, the kind of weight that only comes after hearing more than you were prepared to, and realizing that some of it had been meant for you all along. Once the moment had passed, I closed my eyes and shifted inward, allowing myself to fall into the mental space I used when I needed to speak to her.
The spirit world unfolded around me with its usual rhythm—an endless field of grass, each blade moving slightly despite there being no wind, and a sky that seemed locked in an hour that could have been either early morning or late afternoon. The horizon stretched without interruption, but in the center of it all, as always, was the mirror.
The mirror, however, wasn't the same.
Where it had once been sturdy, reliable, and silently watchful, it now looked unstable, as if it had been pushed past its design limits. There were thin cracks running across its surface, the kind of fractures that don't break something immediately, but tell you clearly that its time is limited. The light around it shimmered and bent, like the seal it once supported was no longer compatible with the world it existed in.
I walked toward it slowly, the grass folding quietly beneath my steps, and when I stopped a few paces away, I spoke—not with force, but with a kind of certainty that didn't require volume to be heard.
"Matatabi," I said, pausing only long enough to make sure I wasn't saying it out of habit, "there's really no reason for you to stay behind that seal anymore. You can come out now."
She didn't answer immediately, but she didn't resist either. The mirror shimmered once, and then split directly down the center in a clean, vertical line. From the opening stepped Matatabi, her form neither aggressive nor ceremonial. She was, as always, balanced and exacting in her presence.
She sat with a kind of casual composure that was very much her own, her tails curling neatly underneath her, and her expression—if she could be said to wear one—was as calm as it had always been, a steady gaze that didn't ask questions or offer reactions, but simply waited to see what I would do next.
There was no need to explain what had happened to the mirror. The disturbances caused by the pocket dimension—the tearing of space and the stress it placed on the seal—had done more than weaken it. They had made it obsolete. The mechanics that had kept her separated from me no longer had a foundation to operate from, and so, what had once been necessary simply no longer applied.
I glanced down at the book Apollo had given me, still held quietly in my hand. With the formulas inside, even if they weren't complete, it wouldn't be long before I could reshape the connection between us into something functional. Something stable. Something that wouldn't rely on barriers or borrowed control.
As that thought took root, another rose to meet it—less immediate, but no less present. I thought about the Mime again, the expression it had worn like a mask carved from stillness, and the absurd, terrifying sense of reality bending around its existence. I didn't feel triumphant, or vindicated. There was no sense of unfinished revenge, only the quiet understanding that I would have to go back.
'I'll be back for you,' I thought, and though the wind never blew here, the grass shifted just slightly, as if to acknowledge it had heard me.
…
Authors note:
You can read some chapters ahead if you want to on my p#treon.com/Fat_Cultivator