It’s Time To Go Home

The cenotaph fell silent, the twin spirits of Elira Ashborne finally fading into the oppressive dark.

Umbra's last words echoed in Michael's mind, a sharp, jarring end to a story that spanned ten thousand years.

A screaming silver disk. A portal closing. A man appearing out of nowhere.

It felt like being caught in a god's fist, Umbra's thoughts whispered from Michael's lap.

He was back to being a scruffy black cat, a small, warm weight against the cold stone.

One moment, we were escaping death. The next, somewhere else entirely. Your mother's soul… the contract just… snapped. That's when I felt a whisper of Elira's aura. It led me here. So, I waited.

Michael gently lifted the cat and placed him on the floor.

He stood, his joints popping. A decade in a timeless realm had reforged his body and soul, but the ache of it all remained.

"It's time to go home," he said, his voice quiet but firm.

He gave a final, deep bow to the empty chair and the lingering sorrow in the air.

He didn't need to say anything else. They knew.

Striding out into the perpetual twilight of the Sanctum, he saw Veyrith, a deeper shadow among the shadows, standing motionless by the entrance.

Their eyes met. No words were needed. Tormentor. Teacher. Savior. Ally.

An unspoken acknowledgment passed between them, and Michael walked on.

At the center of the realm, Elder Morn's colossal eye blinked slowly. The ancient tree's voice rumbled like continents grinding together.

"The path is open, child. But a word of warning. Ten years have passed in your world. Things will not be as you left them."

"Neither am I," Michael replied.

He gripped the cool jade talisman in his pocket, focused his will, and the star-dusted world of the Sanctum dissolved around him in a blinding swirl of violet light.

The transition was a physical shock.

The air, once humming with the pure, thick energy of Primordial Aether, was now thin. It tasted of dust and damp earth.

The silence, once filled with the whisper of cosmic winds, was now punctuated by the chirping of crickets. He was back.

Back in the dilapidated temple, standing on the very spot where a curious monkey and a strange stone had changed his life a lifetime ago.

He stepped outside. the village was just as he remembered, only smaller, quieter.

A single lantern burned in the window of the small, familiar house at the edge of the woods. He pushed the door open.

His father was sitting at the wooden table, a book open before him, though his eyes weren't on the page.

Darius Ashborne looked… old.

Ten years had carved ravines into his face.

His hair was no longer just touched with grey; it was a river of silver. His shoulders, which had always seemed so broad, were slumped with a weight Michael was only now beginning to understand.

Darius looked up, his eyes widening.

"You're… taller."

"You're older," Michael shot back, the old habit of sharp-tongued defiance a comfortable, worn coat.

He stepped into the warm lantern light, letting his father see the man he had become.

The cold resolve in his eyes. The power humming just beneath his skin.

"I know, Dad. I know everything."

Darius flinched as if Michael had struck him.

He slowly, deliberately, closed the book.

"I see. The seal is broken."

"You lied to me," Michael said, his voice low, tight with a decade of simmering, directionless rage.

"All those years, you told me seeking power was reckless. You preached about how it only leads to ruin.

But you didn't forbid it to protect me. You did it to hide me. To keep me weak."

"It was your mother's last wish," Darius whispered, his composure finally shattering.

He wasn't looking at the powerful young man before him, but at a ghost from a decade past.

"After she… after she burned her own soul to send us away, we weren't just teleported. We were pulled. Dragged by a force I couldn't comprehend.

We appeared in the Ashborne ancestral hall.

There was an old woman there… a being of such immense power I couldn't even breathe in her presence."

He shuddered, the memory still raw.

"Your mother's body was already gone, just motes of fading light.

The old woman… she managed to catch the last remnant of her soul. She sealed it inside this."

Darius reached into his robes and pulled out a small, dark pearl that seemed to drink the lantern light, pulsing with a faint, heartbreakingly sorrowful energy.

The Emperor Devil Pearl. Michael's breath caught in his throat. His mother.

"Her last wish," Darius continued, his voice choked with a grief that time had not healed.

"She looked at me, Michael. With her final thought, she begged me… 'Let him be safe.

Let him be normal.' She didn't want this life for you. The fighting, the running, the constant fear of being hunted."

"So you sealed me," Michael said, the white-hot anger draining away, replaced by a vast, hollow ache.

"You and grandpa. You colluded with that old woman and put a cage around my soul to make me 'normal'."

"I was a broken man," Darius confessed, his head sinking into his hands.

"My cultivation was shattered. My wife was a whisper in a pearl.

All I had left was you, and her final words. I was so afraid, son.

Afraid the Blood Divine Sect would sense you.

Afraid I would lose you, too. So, yes."

He looked up, his eyes swimming with unshed tears.

"I chose to make you weak, because I thought weak was safe. I see now… I was wrong."

The silence in the small room was absolute, thick with the weight of ten years of misunderstanding, of a father's suffocating fear and a son's blinding rage.

It all finally settled, a fine dust covering the past.

Michael walked to the table and placed a hand on his father's trembling shoulder.

"I'm not weak anymore. And I'm not hiding.

I'm going to get strong enough that no one can ever touch our family again.

I'm going to bring Mom back."

He looked at the dark pearl, at the last piece of his mother.

"Let me take her with me."

Darius looked up, and through the grief, a flicker of the old fire returned to his eyes.

The fire of the man who had once made a monster explode into red mist to save a woman he'd just met.

He nodded, pushing the pearl across the table.

"Take it. And this." He stood and retrieved a long, cloth-wrapped object from under his bed.

He unwrapped it to reveal a simple, unadorned black whip that hummed with a dormant, terrifying power.

"The God Whipping Whip. The Ashborne family heirloom. It should have been yours a long time ago."

He also handed Michael a worn leather map and a heavy pouch of Primordial Stones.

"This map shows the Mistvale Territory. It's a start. Be smarter than I was. Be stronger than I was."

"I will be," Michael promised, his voice raw.

He spent three more days with his father.

They didn't speak much, but the silence was no longer heavy with anger. It was filled with unspoken understanding, a bridge built across a decade of pain.

On the fourth day, Michael made one last trip to the old temple.

The mischievous monkey was gone, having moved on to grander adventures, but Michael left behind a small pile of life-prolonging pills he'd brewed in the Sanctum's Crucible.

A small payment for a debt he could never truly repay.

With his mother's soul safe in his Interspatial Bracelet, a legendary weapon in his hand, and a new world stretching before him,

Michael Ashborne turned his back on the only home he'd ever known and walked toward the horizon.