The frozen moment wouldn’t last forever. Already, the air was running out energy, the edges of the field beginning to vanish into darkness.

But Nic was making every moment count.

After searching high and low through the fields of battle…

Exploring where huge scars split the earth apart…

The places where corpses lay hidden in the tall grass…

The sprays of blood and gore caught in the instant the world came to a halt…

“Sofia? What can you tell me about these techniques?”

“For techniques, I’m forbidden to teach any but the most basic. And even explaining them is denied, until you’ve seen them for yourself. It’s meant to keep me from guiding you too heavily and deciding your path for you.”

“Right but… I’ve seen these, soooo…”

“Oh, I could describe them. But Nicolas. You can’t learn a technique simply from seeing a single moment of its execution. This is an opportunity to view their Concepts, not the actual methods.”

“Ah.” Nic looked regretfully at a man who was turning his opponent into frogs. Slime and muck were exploding from every pore of the victim, as his flesh blistered up into massive tumors. The largest of the growths were ripping free on their own hoppy, froggy legs.

He could use that kind of power.

But as for what Concepts were involved in turning a man into a pond full of amphibians, Nic didn’t have the slightest clue.

“Try to find one that resonates with your path…”

Nic nodded slowly and set out to search. He wandered through the frozen battlefield a second time, but now he kept his eyes closed, closing off the amber-toned world while searched with his nascent senses for cultivation.

Letting the way each technique felt pull at him.

It was like following the wind.

He let the storm push and pull, some powers dragging at him with a resonating force that seemed to enter his soul and make his bones reverberate, others pushing him away, the same sensation but more violent and somehow full of the unspoken knowledge he wasn’t welcome.

When he opened his eyes again, Nic stood in front of a coffin.

All around him were the dead and dying. Red-robed men with tall, peaked hoods were being mowed down by an army of wolves. They were spirit beasts, with hooves instead of claws and trailing serpentine tails, golden horns extending from their skulls. Blades of sharpened wind burst from their throats and sliced the cultists apart…

But as they died, their blood flowed through the air. It was suspended in the air like a thousand red petals. Those petals accumulated, forming crimson stars and constellations that orbited the coffin.

As for the coffin itself… It was made of a green-grey stone, mottled and full of discolorations, the edges lined with blackening gold. Around it were three rusting iron chains, two of which had burst. One of them was caught mid-break, the snapping chains and the flying shrapnel frozen in motion. And in the inch of dark space where the lid had been pulled aside, a hand emerged.

It was a withered hand of wrinkled, rigid leather, mummified down until it clung to the bones beneath. Each nail was yellow and ragged-edged.

Something about that hand filled Nic with terror, forcing him to stare, almost hypnotized as he took in every detail. A name filled his mind as he observed the tiny flecks of dried gore under each nail.

Patriarch Bloodless.

He stepped back, walking among the dying bodies of the cult. Blood filled up their eyes, literally filling in the tiny space between the lens and the meat of the eye. The veins in their faces ran black.

This was Sacrifice…

Nic touched one of them, finding the skin as hard as stone. Pain was etched into every detail of that face, but there was also something else. A fanatic belief. They gazed straight ahead, and through the pain, they were laughing.

Sacrifice…

They no longer cared for their own lives. They saw something beyond the end and were willing to give themselves to pave the way for that future.

It was devotion beyond death.

“Sofia?”

“This is the Idol of Rebirth. A technique where an almighty cultivator mummifies themselves while alive, so a spark of power and consciousness can be preserved within their corpse. When fed blood by their living descendants, the idol can return to life for a time, serving as a protector for their clan or sect. It is…”

“It’s disgusting.” Nic said, turning his face up.

Maybe some people would see something pure or holy in them going to their deaths with a smile. Nic saw surrender. They were just…

They were embracing their end. One was smiling, arms wide, as if he was about to wrap his arms around the wolf leaping for his throat. They were giving up, and something about that felt perverse. That wasn’t death. That wasn’t sacrifice.

Death was something to fight. You weren’t meant to like it.

You were meant to go down scratching, clawing, biting for a chance - even a tiny chance - to live one bloody second longer. That was why Sacrifice mattered. That’s what gave it strength. If you just waited, limply, for the end…

That was garden variety suicide.

He looked at the coffin with disgust and turned away. This wasn’t his path.

“Nicolas, even if your interpretation of the Concept is different, you could still learn something from them.” Sofia tried to argue.

“But it could harm me, too, couldn’t it? Change my Concept..."

“It’s… possible…” Sofia admitted slowly. “Especially with the Idol itself here. Something of that strength could pass on a Concept forcibly.”

“Yeah.” Nic snorted. “I’m not giving it the chance. Anyway…”

He looked out. The cultists all shared something in common. They were looking across the battlefield, looking towards a single point.

“There’s something else here I’m interested in.”

He followed their gazes, and found himself at the center of the war. Two cultivators were engaged in combat. One was noble, upright, and fair-faced. Snow-white robes whipped about his body as he leaped through the air, his spear reaching for his opponent’s throat. In his other hand he held up a scroll of gold, shining like the dawn’s rising sun.

His opponent was an old, crooked man in grey rags. His hair was unkempt and his teeth were yellow, bared in a feral grin of triumph. With one hand he made a twisting gesture, and from the five iron rings on his fingers black smoke poured forth.

The smoke took the form of ghosts.

They were being burnt away by the scroll’s light, but there were so many of them. A few of the spirits had broken through. Their red fingertips were nearly on the boy’s throat.

“Ah-ha.” Sofia broke into Nic’s trance-like study of the scene. “I recognize this. Nicolas, I know his face. He’s a Heretic. The Ash-Faced Bodhisattva.”

“He sure looks like it…” Nicolas agreed.

“No, Nicolas, not the old man. The young one.”

Nic tilted his head and looked at the white-robed cultivator a second time. His aura felt…

Familiar.

There was something there that reminded Nic of the Aleph. It wasn’t as strong a pull as Patriarch Bloodless had exerted, but there was a connection.

“I recognize him from our listings. He was active on a minor world not long ago, as part of the Red Ash Wheel covenant. They were cornered by Li Blackleaf and his clan after a long string of clashes with the Inquisitors…”

“Did they do this?”

Nic looked up at the amber sky. With it came a reminder he was losing time. The color was dimming every moment, the frozen world going dark.

“Unlikely. Their magic wasn’t involved with time, but with eternity. That was their Heresy. They defied the will of the System and returned from beyond death to live again and again, growing stronger each time. It’s a fairly common heretical path, and the splinter technique they followed wasn’t strong, only allowing for three reincarnations…”

Nic waved his hand to brush away the details. They were on a clock, and she’d go on all day like this if he let her.

“So they could come back from the dead, huh?” Nic paused to consider, and looked at the old man for a moment. “I guess killing them wouldn’t do much good then. Is that why this battle was caught in time? To stop them from dying and being reborn who-knows-where with new bodies?”

“Very likely. If they died they could have reincarnated anywhere in the cosmos, spreading their heresy across each world they touched. This must have been a calculated sacrifice…”

Nic nodded. That sounded like the System he knew. Willing to cut off a limb to spare the body.

In fact, a little over-eager for amputations and blood in general.

He looked over the scroll for a moment, but there was a distortion surrounding the words on the piece of golden parchment. Nothing could be read. The System was one step ahead.

Still…

“Sofia, tell me when it’s time to go.” He settled down on a nearby stone, kneeling and contemplating the Heretic’s final defiant stand. Even knowing death wouldn’t be the end, he clung to life, and his fury could be felt in the spear-thrust that aimed to strike his opponent through the left eye. The point had come to a stop inches from the old man’s iris, almost touching it.

That was a death Nic could respect. A defiance of an entire world against you.

And within the holy aura that poured from the young warrior, Nic finally found something close to his own strange curse, the Concept of Aleph.

The two energies weren’t at all the same.

The young man felt like…

Like…

Nic closed his eyes and focused for a long time, trusting his memory of the scene. Trusting his invisible senses over his physical ones. The two combatants, each posed like a heroic statue, lingered in the dark of his mind.

The young man felt like he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Nic found himself repeating the name of the Heretical cult, the Red Ash Wheel, turning it over in his mouth until the meaning snapped into place with a sudden comprehension...

A wheel for eternity. Ash for suffering.

The wheel was the sign of reincarnation, endless motion that returned to the same point again and again.

Ash was that fixed point to which everything returned. No matter what kind of life you led, suffering would be the cost of existence.

Nic knew why he felt a kindred spirit.

They both shared a fraught relationship with living itself. Hating and loving it with equal fierceness. Knowing they’d only suffer in this life and yet fighting desperately for every second.

Nic knew he’d been on the road of self-destruction for a long time. It was etched into his bones now.

But even he didn’t understand how that balanced with the other fact of his existence: he was a bitch and half to kill. He threw himself into danger and fought his way free, again and again, as if the two weren’t in total contradiction.

This was someone else with that strange nature. Like a moth dancing at the edge of a flame.

“Nicolas. Time’s up.”

Nic’s eyes snapped open. The light was almost gone. Compared to its vibrant tone before the sky was now a weak yellow like discolored bone. He sighed, frustration building in his chest. He was so close…

There was so much to learn. A little more and he might break through. A little more…

The frustration felt like a black lump in his chest. He had been on the verge of breakthrough.

Not expecting anything, Nic reached out and angrily snatched at the scroll fluttering from the heretical cultivator’s grip.

The marks of Aleph hidden in his cultivation sea let out a sudden, chanting resonation.

There was a horrible tearing sound.

And Nic’s heart froze over in surprise as he found himself holding half of the divine scroll.