The Spirit Pavilion!

It was the same everywhere. In Hell, in Zenith, in Pithia, in Shen’Zi—even the entrances to the Spirit Realm themselves were just scaled-up versions of the same building: silver three-story pagoda, a pristine and classy oasis amid endless swathes of bulging filth. It was the same design as long as Dorian could remember, stretching back as it far before he was alive. Back in the early aughts of the Multiverse, when the Spirit Emperor first broke through to Godking and established his first outpost.

This one was wedged between a towering six-floor gym whose logo was a a giant fanged gorilla head dripping blood and a fat metal box strung with chains which seemed more a prison than a gym. They boasted “ABANDON ALL WEAKNESS, YE WHO ENTER HERE!” and “UNLEASH YOUR INNER GODKING!” on glossy banners. The Spirit Pavilion’s slogan, meanwhile, was “The Multiverse’s Testing Grounds.” Clean, simple, and utterly boring.

He would’ve gone for gorilla-fang-blood gym in a heartbeat if it could offer a tenth of what this unassuming little building had.

The Spirit Pavilion conducted the Multiversal rankings. It was taken from a weighted composite score of Dao, Qi and Physique—the three elements which quantified brute strength. And they gave out the definitive ranking of the Multiverse’s chief powers. There were other rankings—the Yunlong ranking, and the Lotus Index were two others of note—but even their lists seemed to pay lip service to the Spirit Pavilion’s. There were always the same cluster of names at the top, ordered a little differently, but whenever the Spirit Pavilion boosted up a name or dropped it down the others soon followed suit. Simply put: if you wanted to know who’s who in the Multiverse, you went to the Spirit Pavilion.

If you wanted to hone your Techniques? To test yourself against the best? There was nowhere better.

As Dorian strolled up, he saw three boards hanging over the entrance. The top 20 rankers of God, Empyrean, and Godking. Peppered with hallowed names. And then—conspicuously new—wedged between#17 Reín Heartless and #19 Wenchao Shen, Number Eighteen. Nameless. Dorian grinned.

He might be number eighteen in power.

But power was not necessarily the same as who would win in a duel to the death. That depended on who was best at utilizing their power.

And for that the Spirit Pavilion kept rankings, too. Kept on a rating scale. Win a fight, your rating goes up. Lose one, it goes down. The names were largely the same as the Power Rankings—only a few names were shuffled up, a few down. Gerard, for instance, was #7 on the Power Rankings.

Back in his heyday Gerard had been the #2 ranked fighter in Spirit Pavilion duels! He’d even briefly cracked the Qi-for-Qi top 10—a standardized ranking of fighting prowess adjusted for skill relative to cultivation rank, and Dorian could attest to it; a memory flashed to mind of their horrible duel—inky-black wings spreading so wide they smothered the sky…

Gerard was far out of practice now, but the man who took care not to step on passing ladybugs on the street had been one of the true monsters of the Multiverse. In one year he’d singlehandedly doubled the number of gravestones in Pithia—and even some Godkings dared not bring him to heel! He’d been such a terror that the Kings of Pithia paid a ludicrous sum to the only creature they could find who dared meet him in battle: the number one ranked Empyrean.

A promising, bright-eyed young fellow by the name of Dorian. A very silly fellow.

A fellow who had in fact rejected that sum. Who thumped his chest, and vowed he needed no payment for the vanquishing of evil! Knowing he was saving lives was payment enough, said Dorian!

He cringed to think of it now. Oh, my mortifying teenage years. Thank Fate I got over that particular phase…

Silvery mist snaked out of the Pavilion, clinging to the floors like a creeping frost. Dorian went in. There was that same line of receptionist spirits up front but he had no use for them today. He strolled past them to the Pavilion’s main attraction. Upstairs: the second floor. It felt like he was walking through what those dewy-eyed mortal artists thought Heaven looked like—pure soft white everywhere, marble walls, marble floors, a pristine silver staircase leading up to a blurry white glow.

The second floor was where all the action was. There was a hexagonal pillar at the very center, a door on each face. There were the hexagonal walls, ringing the pillar. And there was the walkway in the middle. There was a funky conniption of space here. You could walk this hexagonal route endlessly, and there would be new doors—different doors—on each new face of the pillar. And yet you could never circle back the way you came. To get back you had to walk backwards.As Dorian went about, murky figures stepping in and out of rooms, passing him in the bright mist, he kept an eye on the doors. Each had a gem affixed to it, glowing blue if occupied. Three dozen doors down, he found an empty one.

He opened the door and stepped in and it was every bit as weird as he recalled. It felt like his body was being licked by a huge tongue, front-to-back, yet nothing touched him. And as he closed the door behind him, and it clicked shut, there was a subtle shift in the room. Like that clicking shut had also shut the door on the world as he knew it.

Now he was in some in-between space. A space with no real place. An extension of the Spirit Realm. He wasn’t really here. It was all a simulation, a consensual delusion of the senses.

The floor looked like a graph. Straight gray squares in a latticework running out to invisible horizons. The sky was featureless, like a night sky with no stars, only with the colors inverted. It gave the same feeling of endlessness. There was nothing else here.

Vaguely he felt a pressure on his mind, the way you might feel a pressing on your ears deep underwater. It was the mental pressure of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other minds in their own little rooms…

“WELCOME SPIRIT 19485: DORIAN.” A woman’s voice, but a composite: like it was a hundred different voices spliced together. A crowd speaking at once. But he knew it was only one being, in truth: The Spirit of the Pavilion.

“How may I assist you today? Drilling? Sparring? Dueling? Or would you like to seek guidance from a Spirit Pavilion expert?”

“A Technique test. Make a sandbox field—let’s say… grass.” He’d gone from desert to Hell. Not a speck of greenery to be found. It got boring after a while.

“As you wish,” said the Spirit.

And he stood in a wide-open plain, the sky above the a crisp light blue, dappled with just the right amount of cloud. Lush tufts of grass swayed beneath his feet.

Which first? Fist? Technique? Movement? The Fist called to him most. He was in the Spirit Pavilion, the Multiverse’s testing grounds! Some of its most high-profile duels garnered viewership in the hundreds of millions. Dorian itched to try his hand at it again. Far more than grasses he did miss a spar against a real expert… Someone who could get his blood running hot, like his runs did…

“One Punch Kill, eh?” He flipped breezily through its tattered pages, soaking in the diagrams, the ideas, letting them congeal again in his mind—but with the holes filled in, its suboptimal qi-paths corrected. You had to be a certain build to use this Technique well. It was an all-out blast, carving a huge chunk out of his reserves. It favored the chunky fighter, the ones with qi to spare. Even Dorian would punch himself out in under a minute. Then he’d be fucked.

Only he had trouble believing anyone save for an elite Empyrean could survive that long an onslaught.

Paired with a grappling Technique—some way to merge his Tail with Yama’s Chain’s principles?—and it’d work wonders. Drag them in, beat them up. He rather liked the idea of playing the hulking brute. In most of his runs he always found himself the small one, the quick one, coasting off wits and reflexes and timing. It was a style he knew well. But the idea of simply walking up, soaking damage, and flattening fools did tickle him quite a bit.

You chose your style to suit your build, after all.

The attribute was Fire. But a few minor adjustments here and there and he figured he could sneak some Darkness in too. This would augment his Fist of the Falling Star.

He sat down cross-legged.

“Blackboard and chalk?” The Spirit graciously delivered them. And he began to scribble notes.

…

…

It took him six hours to work out all the kinks. He stared down at a diagram of a body, all its arteries, veins, meridians and channels neatly mapped. A maze of arrows pointed to chunks of text scribbled atop other chunks of text. But the bulk of it was in his mind now, and he knew the shape of the move.

What disturbed him was how long it took.

Six hours? It was a high-Tier Technique. He couldn’t expect to magic a brand-new Technique out of thin air, like he could with Lower Realm manuals. He had his intuition, and experience, and understanding. Yet that vast untapped library of half-remembered manuals was missing.

Maybe another casualty of Zenith’s fall. My bodies were cut off the Multiverse.

He frowned.

What a nasty thought to bring into such a pleasant training session. He promptly cast it out of his mind. This is a time for celebration! My first Technique is made!

It was a Fist of Two Parts.

One hand quick and violent as a meteor. The other heavy and violent as a mudslide. Both served with enough qi to reduce your average mortal to his constituent particles. It was a spiffy piece of work, if he did say so himself, and he was feeling quite proud of it.

He had a sneaking suspicion it would hurt a lot of people’s feelings. Very soon.

A great Technique deserves a great name! Pity none came to mind. For now…

“I shall call you… Fist of Rising Moon, Falling Star.”

[Level Up!]

[Fist of Rising Moon, Falling Star]

Lv. N/A -> 0

He glanced around at the peaceful meadow. “Kind of anticlimactic to try it out for the first time here, isn’t it?”

Anyone could beat up some grass.

“Spirit of the Pavilion? I’d like to request a ranked duel.”

“The base wager on a duel request is one mid-grade Spirit Stone.”

Dorian wrinkled his nose. “Don’t give me some bozo. I want one of your top experts—give me someone ranked…. let’s say… at least top ten thousand at the God level. Close combat. Humanoid preferable.”

“This request will cost fifteen mid-grade Spirit Stones.”

“Done.”

“Processing…”

“Oh!” Nearly forgot a critical point. “Don’t use my old name. I’m keeping a low profile.”

“Would you like to set up a new profile under a new alias?” said the Spirit. “Your rating will be reset.”

“Go for it! Call me … “ A great fighter, too, deserved a great name. ...Pity none came to mind. He scratched his head. “Fuck me. Give me a sec—”

“Profile ‘Fuck me.’ created. Requesting duel…”

…Whatever.

As a new profile, Dorian’s rating would be set provisionally at zero. He’d look just like any other fresh-out-the-dojo youngster seeking his first real fight. There were thousands a day—coming in tingling with that nervous excited bouncy energy, leaving hours later in tears. No doubt he seemed like easy pickings. And for such a high sum, too…

He smirked.

Who’s going to bite?