Gaining the aether sent by the deceased 319th iteration, the 321st iteration started to absorb the aether remaining.

He only first encountered danger when a golden Ascetic appeared before him. This sent a wave of contemplation through Mathias. He could either send his aether away and kill himself or use it for defense.

If he uses the aether for defense, he loses progress and he’s just 17 minutes away. If he sends the aether away he dies again. Mathias was getting really scared, he only had 3 more iterations in stasis.

Mathias knew that during the final minute it was likely that every iteration on the field would die.

Defending and escaping here, even if it delayed his progress, might be the right move.

The Ascetic then stared at him, dumbfounded, “W-what? You-you weren’t. What you’re doing is madness, do you not fear for your main body?”

The Ascetic of course quickly grasped the fact that these were real body doubles created of Mathias Calypses. He was able to come to this conclusion through simple observation.

What he didn’t understand was that there was no main body. Realizing that the Ascetic had a misunderstanding, the 321st Mathias Calypses saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

“You stumbled across both of me, what does that tell you?” Mathias asked.

“That you’re a lunatic.” The Ascetic replied.

“Why are you doing all of this? Just for some elders and a few Initiates, it’s unreasonable. Why let yourself be controlled by fate when you can stop it?” Mathias asked.

“Are you asking me why I want vengeance for my clansmen?” said the Ascetic.

“No, I can guess that. I’m asking you why you would willingly cooperate with fate. When you do so you slowly give up your right to go against it in the future.” Mathias said seriously.

The Ascetic’s eyes widened at this remark, this, of course, wasn’t even a true statement. It was something made up by Mathias Calypses, although it was also something that couldn’t be checked or verified.

The possibility of this statement’s validity made the Ascetic start to re-think his strategy.

Mathias planned to use the ignorance of the Ascetic against him.

The Ascetic then stopped approaching him, “I stopped, that means I can still control myself. I do not think you are telling the truth, I think you are lying to me. I believe you possess significant fear at this point in time. Replacer, even if you are telling the truth, I think I can afford to kill you here.” The Ascetic calmly threatened.

“Maybe it will be fine for now, but what about the next time and the next time after that? You should already be fully aware that I am nothing but a clone of the true replacer. It is common knowledge that if you keep hunting the various me throughout the forest, you shall eventually find the real me but how long would that take? I fear that by the time you accomplished such a feat, you’d already be a slave.” Mathias warned.

10 more minutes, he thought.

“I must applaud you for your clone creation, they seem very real. The level of intelligence instilled in them is quite high. They, for some strange reason, also seem to be able to feel pain. Why is that, I wonder?”

Have I been figured out? I should at least be able to stall 4 more minutes to the 5 minute stage. After two of the iterations were most likely killed by Ascetics, no other iteration has died or even called for help. I believe it’s because the gamble overtaxed the power it allocated to the 1-hour stage.

Mathias believed that stalling the Ascetic to the five-minute stage held extreme merit, yet anything past that was impossible.

“Even if you kill me here, you’ll never find my main body in time. I have too many clones for you to run through and you have too little time to run them through.” Mathias Calypses said to him.

At this comment the golden Ascetic smiled and spoke, “Although there are no technical limitations placed upon the number of real body double clones, a being at the level of a clan elder does not have resources nor capabilities to reasonably make more than one-hundred. There is too much time and coordination involved. So even if you did make a hundred clones, six hours is still plenty of time, plus I could always…”

In that instant the Ascetic activated his domain on the 321st iteration of Mathias Calypses. As soon as he realized he was caught in it, Mathias grasped the plan of the Ascetic.

He was going to attack all of Mathias’ iterations through one iteration!

Even if the Ascetic couldn’t kill all of the iterations through this, he could at least locate them. The Ascetic didn’t react immediately, this was to probe the fear of Mathias. To see if the person who created these clones thought that this plan could work.

The 321st iteration used this brief peacetime to transfer all of his aether to the newly awakened 322nd iteration.

Not long after the transfer was completed, a golden light blasted the intestines out of the 321st iteration’s body. Gasping for air out of shock, horror and pain, Mathias Calypses quickly conversed a small sentence to the Ascetic,

The golden Ascetic then furrowed his brows in a strange manner, he did not intend to kill the replacer’s clone then, he just instinctively did it, as if it was the guiding hand of fate. This thought prompted another one in the Ascetic’s mind,

the five-minute stage!

Upon the gamble reaching 5 minutes, it instantly recovered its spent energy, prompting the Ascetic to use more aether than he wanted to, causing the death of the 321st iteration.

While he was sitting in the forest, the 317th iteration was almost crushed by a tree. Then two more trees fell where he was. Mathias looked around manicly, although he already believed that this was because of no human intervention.

He knew that this was because of the five-minute stage, he just wanted to discern if the gamble was causing the trees to fall because of probability or if it was forcing somebody else to fell the trees. These two methods were the ways Mathias Calypses believed the gamble would use to cause such an act.

Upon finding no culprits he knew that the gamble was causing this using probability manipulation alone. He figured that it did this due to the fact that there were no people in a close enough vicinity who could harm him.

The Devil’s Gamble follows a certain set of rules even at the five-minute stage, it can twist others’ logic into doing things which harm the ascender but cannot control their minds and will completely, the only time where this isn’t the case is when someone does something absentmindedly, without thinking about it much.

Unconsciously walking in a direction just because and finding the ascender is an example of this.

But if all the mortals are running from the chaos with only survival on their mind and if every clan member is reeling in terror at the strange happenings and is more concerned about getting out of danger than anything else, the gamble cannot get them to openly confront Mathias Calypses.

Realizing this fact, Mathias assumed that they were either too preoccupied to get caught up in the gamble or too far away for the gamble to justify bringing them in. This is because the gamble is a natural phenomenon and hence takes the path of least resistance.

If it can destroy a tree using less energy, it will.

Because of this, Mathias Calypses could be sure that uprooting the trees with probability manipulation was the path of least resistance. Meaning that it could not bring people in at this moment.

At that moment, he felt off. It was a feeling he had never felt before, it felt kind of suffocating.

It took more energy to move then he thought it would. His arms weighed heavy as he pulled them up to his forehead, feeling lightheaded.

In his headache he pulled his hand from his head and placed it on his chest, the feeling caused him to smile wryly.

Shortly after this, Mathias slowly turned his head to face the sun, the real sun. It shined brightly down on him.

Basking in the rays of heat he felt cold, freezing even. Mathias started to shiver, he breathed out deeply expecting to see his breath in the air, yet such a sight never reached him.

His smile fell and he slumped down to his knees, laying against a broken tree.

His heart stopped.

31,789.

This was the amount of times Mathias Calypses had tried to destroy and regenerate his heart.

When he was ascending to an Adept, his gamble wasn’t so extreme, if his heart stopped he could always just rebuild it.

All of this was just so impossible, Mathias wondered how Ascetics could ever be created. He had talked to Ascetics before and didn’t consider them to be smarter than him to a ridiculous degree.

It was at this moment where he remembered something Julien had said to him, “Why are you crying? You think you have it hard, you have no idea, Calypses. Haha, but I do suppose you are unlucklier than most.”

Mathias Calypses took Julien’s words as a success story to live by. Don’t get it wrong, Mathias hated Julien Watson. After all, the alchemist of law had indirectly killed his entire family, god and dimension.

But the kind of strength held by Julien Watson was something that could always be respected. He believed that when Julien said that he didn’t have it hard, he was talking about it in comparison to himself.

If somebody can have it harder than me and succeed, I have nothing to give up on, because I am Mathias Calypses, the smartest person in the universe. The greatest person in the universe. Because of this, I cannot fall where others’ succeed.

Pride, an unrealistic ridiculous form of pride based in nothing but his own imagination.

Was the only reason Mathias Calypses could even make it as far as he did. 

osphere, it did not sound like it came from a human being,

it sounded like a form of static instead.

At this moment every dead and alive iteration of Mathias Calypses was teleported into the sky in a place consisting of a very small point. A point smaller than even the concept of size could represent.

This was possible because there was no longer any interference.

From that infinitesimally small dot a figure of Mathias Calypses appeared, a long azure-haired boy with dark blue eyes wearing a celestial blue priestly robe. His skin was as pale as snow and almost glowing.

That figure then smiled, waving his hand bye as he took a step forward in the air.

Mathias Calypses left, startling the golden Ascetic. He had expected a counterattack and instantly prepared a certain degree of preventive measures but alas, Mathias Calypses didn’t attack.

If the golden Ascetic spent all his effort on attempting to track the teleportation he could have found out where Mathias had gone to but he didn’t, so the Ascetic had no idea where he went.

At that moment, a notion of perpetual ignorance and frustration passed over his mind but instead of yelling at the world, the Ascetic took in the Hua forest air and turned his head to look at the trees.

He sought no grand discovery or recollection for such an action, he was just, thinking.