Power of Runes Chapter 527: Dimensional Ruler (1)

[Ash POV]

As the Rune Space of the Will of Harmony slowly vanished from the surroundings and Ash heard its final words, it felt as though an explosion had suddenly erupted inside his consciousness, leaving his entire mind trembling beneath the weight of what he had just heard.

The meaning carried by those words was beyond anything he could properly put into words.

The words seemed to repeat in his mind again and again.

For a few moments, Ash simply remained there, unable to digest what he had just heard, before countless thoughts suddenly erupted through his mind and began colliding with one another so quickly that he could barely hold onto any of them.

He had no idea who that person was, what kind of existence could actually seal the Runes, or what had happened in the distant past for something like that to become necessary, and although it was obvious that whoever had sealed them would eventually have some reason to return, Ash still couldn’t understand why that moment had to come now, when he had finally managed to hide himself away and peacefully comprehend the Runes without anyone breathing down his neck.

Ash almost felt like complaining.

He had only just reached 10% comprehension of Harmony, finally gained the ability to speak with one of the Rune Wills again, and instead of receiving some peaceful answers to the countless questions he had accumulated over the years, the first thing he was told was that his survival was on the line and that the one who had been behind everything was about to return.

And then Harmony had immediately asked him to comprehend Time.

His thoughts wandered for another moment before he finally returned to the one question that bothered him the most.

That question naturally followed the others.

If the other Rune Wills already knew something he didn’t, then there had to be a reason ’Harmony’ was pushing him toward ’Time’ instead of asking him to comprehend ’Death’ or ’Life’, the two life-saving Runes that had helped him through almost every major juncture of his journey.

Then another possibility suddenly surfaced within his mind.

That was a question that had been plaguing him ever since he came into this world, yet he had never been able to find any real answer to it.

He had many suspicions, but he had never found anything that could confirm even one of them.

Even now, he still wasn’t sure.

Why had he been transmigrated?

Why had he received the Unique Trait?

Why had Nancy also been transmigrated into this world as Elysia?

And if all of this was truly connected to the same person, then why had the two of them been chosen in the first place?

The more Ash thought about it, the more questions appeared, until his mind was being flooded with possibilities that he couldn’t prove or even properly connect together.

He remembered the person he had once been before all of this had started.

An ordinary human.

Weak.

Pathetic.

Someone who had known nothing about Runes, cultivation, the Infinite Dimensions, or the countless existences that now stood far beyond his understanding.

His expression became slightly complicated.

The thought lingered for a moment longer, but Ash suddenly forced himself to stop, because there was no point in drowning himself beneath questions for which he had absolutely no answers.

He could continue guessing for hours and still remain exactly where he was.

Ash took a slow breath and pushed those thoughts aside one after another, his attention finally returning to the Runes before him.

His gaze settled upon the Rune of Time.

A faint grin slowly appeared across his face as his eyes narrowed with renewed determination.

**

[Present] - [Arthur POV]

For an unknown amount of time, Arthur remained trapped within the flood of memories, his consciousness being dragged from one life to another without any control over where he would be taken next, and every time he managed to understand what he was seeing, another memory appeared before the previous one had even settled, making the entire experience feel less like remembering and more like being forced to live countless lives all over again.

He found himself standing in a small village beneath falling snow, his body young and unfamiliar, with cold air entering his lungs as he ran through the narrow streets while an old woman chased after him, angrily shouting about the clothes he had once again ruined, and although Arthur couldn’t remember her name, he could still feel the embarrassment of being caught, the cold against his fingers, and the laughter that escaped him when he finally hid behind a wooden house.

The memory changed naturally, almost without a clear boundary, and suddenly he was sitting at a small wooden table inside that same house, with the old woman placing a warm bowl of food before him while continuing to complain about how thin he had become, and Arthur could remember the taste of the food, the sound of her voice, and the warmth that had filled that little room far more clearly than he could remember anything about his current life.

Then the years passed.

He grew older, the village became smaller, the old woman eventually disappeared, and before Arthur could even understand that she was gone, he found himself standing beside a lake beneath a sky filled with stars, listening to an old man speak about the distant lights above them while his younger self quietly wondered whether anyone lived on those stars.

The memory changed again, and this time he was surrounded by people he didn’t recognize, standing on a mountain covered in flowers while they celebrated something he had accomplished, with one of them laughing loudly and pulling him into the group while Arthur complained that they were making far too much noise.

That life continued for a while.

Then it ended.

Arthur didn’t even see the ending, because he was simply somewhere else, standing upon a battlefield beneath a red sky as blood ran through the cracks in the ground and a broken weapon rested in his hand, while someone called his name from somewhere behind him, yet before he could turn around, the memory was already fading away.

Another life came, showing a house filled with laughter before suddenly changing into a lonely journey through a forest, then a woman holding his hand, then a child sleeping against his chest, then a city burning beneath a dark sky, then a grave covered in flowers, and finally his own body lying dead beneath an unfamiliar sky before another birth began and the entire cycle started once more.

The memories began moving faster, much faster, until Arthur no longer had the time to fully experience them, because entire years passed through his consciousness like a breath, followed by decades that disappeared before he could remember the names of the people around him, and then entire lifetimes began flashing through his mind as little more than feelings, faces, places, and moments that were already gone before he could reach them.

He saw himself as a cultivator, then a scholar, then a soldier, then a ruler, then someone so weak that simply surviving another day felt like an achievement, while countless other lives passed through him so quickly that only fragments remained, and the memories kept coming until even their number became impossible to understand.

Millions of years passed.

Perhaps far more.

Arthur stopped trying to count them because the number had already become meaningless, and the lives themselves had begun blending together until he could no longer tell where one ended and another began, yet somewhere within that endless stream, certain things started appearing again and again.

The strange contract.

The twenty-five lights.

The incomplete Soul.

The distant figure whose face remained hidden.

The endless Dimensions stretching beneath someone’s gaze.

Each image appeared for only a moment before being swallowed by countless other memories, but unlike the ordinary scenes from his many lives, these fragments carried a strange weight that made Arthur’s consciousness instinctively slow down whenever they appeared, as though some forgotten part of him already knew that they were connected to something far more important.

Then the memories changed.

The worlds became older, the surroundings became stranger, and the versions of himself that appeared within them carried an existence that felt completely different from the countless lives he had just witnessed, with some memories lasting only a moment while others unfolded so quickly that Arthur could barely see more than a single image before the next one replaced it.

He saw himself standing before an endless expanse of nothingness, with countless worlds shining beneath a distant gaze as a hand slowly reached toward something that gave off the same strange feeling as the twenty-five lights, and then, for the briefest moment, he saw an enormous Tree stretching beyond what his eyes could comprehend before a figure appeared before it.

He heard a voice.

He saw himself turn.

And then the memory shifted again before he could catch another word.

Arthur’s consciousness began trembling because he knew this was different, as these were no longer memories of the lives he had lived after reincarnation, nor were they fragments of ordinary experiences that had simply been buried beneath the weight of time.

These memories belonged to the beginning.

His beginning.

He saw himself standing somewhere so vast that there was no sky and no ground, only endless darkness filled with countless distant lights, and for one brief moment, Arthur felt the weight of an authority that made every other version of himself seem insignificant.

Then the scene changed.

A civilization.

A battle.

A world collapsing.

A single figure standing above it all.

Another change.

A contract.

A Tree.

Twenty-five lights.

A blank fragment.

A future being observed.

Words he could not fully hear.

A decision being made.

And then...

Everything became silent.

Arthur found himself standing before a figure that seemed to carry the weight of an entire Dimension upon its shoulders, and although the face remained difficult to see, the moment Arthur’s gaze met those eyes, something deep within his consciousness responded with absolute certainty.

He knew those eyes.

He knew that expression.

He knew that feeling.

And with that realization, a word finally surfaced from the deepest part of his Soul, one that carried a weight far greater than anything else he had felt since the memories began returning.

Arthur’s consciousness went completely still.

For a moment, he simply stared at the figure before him, unable to speak as the countless memories continued moving around him, because now he finally understood what he had been looking at.

It was not some ancient existence he had once encountered.

It was him.

Yet there was something that troubled him more than the revelation itself.

His memories were returning now.

Arthur’s gaze slowly shifted as the fragmented memories surrounding him began fading away, because he no longer needed to search through them, having finally remembered everything that was necessary for him to understand the situation.

And he knew exactly who that variable was.

**