Time Since Reckless Self-Endangerment: 2 Days 18 Hours

Goal: Kill 'Baby Boots'

Two spheres, gold and silver, drifted into the air as the doll-soldier fell apart. Lavhin screamed as Nic ripped his soul crystal out of the horror-chair and held it aloft.

“Tell me.” He said, with threat in his low, steady voice. “How to cure Sofia.”

“The fruit tree! It’s a natural mental treasure! It will hold off the infection!” Lavhin sank to his knees, phasing partway through the floor as he groveled. “I don't have a true cure, but- Please! I have so much knowledge. I’ve spent my life collecting secrets. I can be useful to you.”

Nic sneered at the shamelessness. His fingers squeezed around the crystal and he could feel Lavhin’s soul swimming within, squirming about like a tadpole of Spiritual Essence. It would only take a tighter grip to squeeze it to powder.

“Nic? He-he’s right. He’s too useful to us, and too helpless in his current state to make any more trouble. We should let him live.”

“I know.” But Nic didn’t have to like it. Every instinct in his body said to throw the twisted shard of crystal to the ground. “But…”

His fingers tightened.

“Please. Be reasonable!” Lavhin begged.

Reasonable. Reasonable meant letting this insect live. Meant ignoring the people he’d harmed and the atrocities he’d committed and just doing what benefited Nic the most in the moment. It meant letting any number of crimes pass unpunished, so long as they served him in the end. And what would the world be if everyone followed those rules? Nic had suffered so many times back on City d23 at the hands of reasonable men, looking out for themselves.

Nic wasn’t reasonable. It might as well have been a curse word. He flung the shard to the ground and stomped down hard as Lavhin shrieked.

The crystal broke into a thousand pieces under his foot and Lavhin exploded into fragments of light that slowly flickered out.

“A shame.” Was all Sophia said. “But… I understand.”

The adrenaline pumped through his veins.

Grasping a pair of fruits from the tree Nic bit down. The pale pink rind gave way to soft white inside with the texture of a peach, fuzzy and pulpy as he chewed it down to the twisting core of hardened flesh and seeds. By the time he’d wolfed the second one down his head felt incredibly clear.

Ice Palace Fruit. F-Class // Flora. This sacred fruit was once only grown on the highest mountains, eaten by the monks who tended the orchards. While it has since spread across the known worlds, the power is more than a mere superstition, and these fruits can bolster and sharpen the mind.

“Is that any better, Sophia?”

“Yes. Yes, much better, thank you Nic- Nicolas.” She already sounded more herself. “These fruits contain Esper, a sort of mental equivalent to aura. If we can find a steady supply I think we can keep the infection from advancing until we find a permanent solution.” Yep, that was her. Cold and lecturing- at this point Nic found it reassuring.

“It’s good to have you back. Now, let’s loot the place.”

“You know, I could not agree more. These things are much too nice to be left behind.” He could hear the faint grin in Sophia’s voice.

He reached for the first of the prizes.

The golden bubble unfurled into a small box of red wood with curved sides and a lid of ornate gold. Within was an oblong, jet-black tablet stamped with the seal of a dragon curling around a pillar, and a long bone needle for tattooing.

Beast Companion Skin-Inscription. F-Class (Peak) // Treasured Artifact. Forged using the bone of an ancestral lion, this pale needle can forge a bond between man and beast. By mixing the blood of a beast of your Class or below into the ink, and piercing into your own flesh with the anointed needle, you will create a binding mark that allows you to communicate telepathically and command it in battle. Moreover, the mark can be used to pull them into a small extradimensional space. The needle and ink can be used three times.

Nic slid the cover back on with shaking hands. It was a golden-tier treasure alright. His Totemic Hunter Glyphs were able to steal the powers of anything he could face in combat, but this-

This was a way to make true companions along the lonely road of cultivation. This was a way to escape having to spend his days alone, soaked in blood with nobody to talk to besides the ghost that lived in his head.

Some cultivators lived like that.

Nic knew he’d go insane.

The second bubble puffed apart in a drift of a divine mist, revealing a shard. It was oblong and dark and full of strange drifting marks that appeared on the surface like breath on a window in winter, fading away just as quickly.

Ink-Fathoms Shard. G-Class (Peak) // Primary. This shard contains purest Essence attuned to the concepts of language and writing. It allows the wielder to speak all languages and to create inks that carry both this property and the ability to aid in runescribing. due to peak quality, the resulting skill will be easy to advance. Well suited to forming a Myriad Core, an Archivist Core, or a Pacifism Core.

It had been a while since Nic had found a Shard. Now he found a Primary, at peak quality. It’s only weakness was that it was at G-Class.

But the combination of the two items was the System telling him something. He wasn’t supposed to absorb this Shard - he couldn’t since since he lacked an open slot - but to give it to another creature. One that would become his voice.

Really, when he considered his limited Shards, two ways of using the Skin-Inscription came to mind. One was simply to bond with the most fearsome beasts he could to strengthen himself in battle. But another, and possibly more tempting, was to find creatures with unique abilities and feed them the proper Shards to make them useful extensions of his own abilities.

That was the route the System seemed to suggest through this gift, which offered not only the voice he’d lost but assistance with his runes.

But the System’s gifts weren’t all he’d gained. The fruit tree was swept into his bag. Even the clay pot it stood in was covered in runes to help the tiny sapling grow. He ransacked the library too. Most of the books were mostly complicated tomes on spiritual sciences and the composition of souls. Nic blanched at the thought of actually reading them- but maybe that old turtle would pay for the library’s treasures.

Next was the workstation. Nic swept up dozens of pens in different calibers, alongside inkstones and grinding pestles, magnifying lenses for working on small runes, and a dozen pages of scratchy notes depicting homemade glyphs. Again he discovered odd empty spots in the drawers and the dust on the desk. Places where things had been conspicuously removed.

But there was enough there to sate his greed for high-quality runescribing equipment.

He turned towards the black jade meditation plate.

Smoke-Void-Soul Meditation Mat. F-Class (Peak) // Treasured Artifact. This ancient meditation platform helps clear the mind of distractions and hone spiritual perceptions. Raises meditating cultivation rate by 10% or up to 5.0 Essence per minute.

With a sigh, Nic paused. The plate was heavy but he’d be able to shove it into his pack if he ditched some of the lesser tools he’d piled in.

But for once, Nic was in a meditative mood. The act of carving his way up this tower had put him into conflict with horror after horror. He’d seen the cost of making the Sophonts and heard his closest ally defend the human price of Pathos’ experiments. He’d met Lavhin, who was pathetic- but no more so than you’d expect from a heretic who’d spent thousands of years imprisoned, slowly losing their humanity.

In short-

He needed to make sense of this.

Pressing a Spirit Purifying Pill into his mouth, he injected the antidote and sat down on the mat.

From the moment he settled onto the meditation platform, his view of the room bled away. It was replaced by a starry void in which distant cold suns shone through an abyss of black swirled with faint misty nebulas. The sense within that illusion was one of total calm, distance from reality, and quiet peace. He savored the moment as he sat like a god among planets and stars.

From his pack he took the glass bell in one hand and the red feather in the other. He’d acquired both just a day or so ago- but it felt like his days were becoming lifetimes.

As the antidote slowly unlocked his cultivation he began to turn the energy within him, circulating it through his veins and his flesh. Bit by bit the fiery, ever-present strength of his body returned, and he itched to leave the mat and rush into some new adventure.

He resisted that.

Instead he focused on the things he felt. The tumult of encountering this sad realm of the dead. His hatred of Lavhin.

Wasn’t Lavhin a person too? How had he grown so warped? Not even the Lavhin that Nic had met, who had thousands of years of imprisonment to explain his lost humanity, but the one who’d began these experiments years ago.

He worried it was an awful lot like Sophia’s defense of Pathos. The claim that everything would be made right in the end, if only he had more control, more power.

And when...

After thousands of years…

That promise didn’t come true, when Lavhin failed…

He had simply grown more and more desperate for a second chance so he didn’t have to give up his empire of lies and promised futures to face what he’d really done…

After a seemingly endless amount of time in the void, the bell in his hand rung out. It was full. Spiritual Essence had collected to the brim, and Nic drew it into himself as he crushed the bell to dust, sending a stream of ethereal energy to a node right between his eyebrows.

With a soft ringing voice the bell rang a final time and Nic felt everything intensify.

His emotions. His perception of the starry void. His sense of his own heartbeat.

Everything drew into focus. The sorrow and anger he felt redoubled, and Nic almost felt mad as his heart beat wildly and his head spun for a moment, lost amidst the star-sea.

He’d heard stories about cultivators going insane and losing control of their cultivation to the point it tore them apart. Now he finally understood. Advancing the path of Spiritual Clarity made everything more, including the emotions he’d rather not feel. And this was only the first step along the path.

Thankfully the intense first rush was fading. His heartbeat began to still, and before the moment was lost entirely, Nic reached for the feather in his left hand.

A stream of violent Essence containing the concept of pure fire flowed in his body.

Instantly the starry void took on a new aspect. Everything blazed with light, and he saw a sea of suns blossom before him to fill the dark with a million floating spheres of golden fire. One by one the suns grew from tiny sparks into enormous horizons of flame.

Some suns burned low and dark-red. Others hot and azure blue. A few burned so brightly they took up entire segments of the sky, and Nic watched as they erupted into novas, spilling outwards in vast detonations of white radiance.

One by one, the lesser suns began to do the same. The universe filled with smoke as stars collapsed or expanded into infernos. One by one, the sky emptied and the darkness returned.

The last to go were the lowest and smallest of the stars. They looked like miserable little embers in the dark, glowing a mean orange shade as they slowly flickered out without ceremony.

What remained were drifting rings of debris and the darkness that engulfed all. But when he looked to where the supernovas had blazed, new planets were forming. The dust of their deaths was collecting into new worlds and new suns.

Nic thought he understood, this time. The brightest stars had gone first, but they had chosen their path. The mean little embers had gotten to live at the cost of leaving nothing behind.

From the day he arrived at the orphanage, his parents dead, Nic had known he wasn’t long for this world. He’d chosen not to be afraid of that- and fought to prove it by being the most fearless, the most reckless among the boys at Winterhome. His own survival surprised him. His old body had been traced with scars from near-misses, and he’d spent it going down in a bloody blaze of glory.

Even now he’d been given a second chance, he didn’t think about the stories of immortal cultivators who lived for thousands of years. He thought of the ones who’d had glorious deaths and changed the world with their blood.

Because that was the only way Nic knew how to live- hurtling towards death just to show he wasn’t afraid. It was better that then being a low, fearful ember, the last one left in a dark sky. Like Lavhin begging for his life and still dying just the same.

The Cosmos Speaks

A Concept is Named, a Road is Found

You bear the Concept of Sacrifice

We get only one chance to die. We must make it count.

Effects: Converts Essence to aura. Rate of conversion doubles when seriously wounded.

1% of Essence converted to Spiritual Essence.