An excerpt from: “A Mad Man’s Repository: A Conceptual Compendium on the Unreasonableness of the Universe.”
I thought I should include a few short pages on the world trials—their quirks, how they operate, etc—if only to help keep the inane rules and guidelines straight in my own head. Right! So, first things first, it’s important to note that the actual rules of each trial differ wildly depending on its star designation, though one thing in particular seems to be consistent throughout each.
The grace period.
In each trial there is a period of time in which the actual meat of the trial is put on hold. This is often joined by what I like to call a “safe zone.” A starting area in which death is, if not impossible, then far less likely to occur haphazardly. In other words, the environment in which you first spawn, no matter how inhospitable or hostile it may seem, will not go out of its way to kill you.
Basically, if you somehow die in a safe zone, it was more than likely your own damned fault. Which brings me to my next revelation. Dying whilst within a designated grace period does not mean the end of the trial. Far from it, in fact. Until you’ve exited the grace period proper, you can, and likely will, restart said trial indefinitely—whether you like it or not.
It’s something of a double-edged sword, since, to this day, I have not discovered a way to manually opt out of a trial once you’ve started it, beyond completing or outright failing it. The latter a dubious prospect which comes with the risk of severe soul damage. As far as I know, you could spend years in a trial world, trying and failing to meet the right requirements without progressing to the actual trial.
And what are these nebulous requirements, you may be asking? Well, the answer is fairly simple. Merely show a basic proficiency with the tools you entered with. Your mantras, in other words. Something I haven’t really found to be all that difficult.
Although I’ve since been informed that it normally takes years to do what I can usually bang out in few minutes.
Not sure exactly how that works, but it at least explains why the whole grace period thing exists in the first place. I’d honestly begun to think it’s inclusion to be entirely redundant. After all, what difference could a few seconds of safety really make? Just to confirm something I already knew how to do? It felt wholly unnecessary, but I suppose that was just my arrogance speaking.
Which brings me to my final revelation. To officially start the trial, you would need to successfully invoke your mantras, all of your mantras, within the designated safe zone. Until that time, you are effectively immortal, and every action you take, transitory. All it would take for you to start all over, to wipe the slate clean and try again from the very beginning, merely to surrender to the macabre fate that comes for all of us in the end. Because, until the grace period ends, death is only temporary.
|Ascendant Boon|
Ranger Archetype: Sphere of Omniscience I
Blocking out the brilliant rain of fire that surrounded her—doing her best to ignore the grunting of men, and the constant whir of their machines—she zeroed in on just their faces, and then on one face in particular. She was upon him in seconds. Ascending the stair-step rise of floating platforms with ease, until she’d reached the very pinnacle—the widest platform by far.
With a wave of her hand, she swept away the chaff—flinging armor clad bodies off into the distant horizon. Stalking towards her quarry, slow enough that her mere proximity didn’t trigger his inconvenient demise, she reached forward to grasp the pest by his throat.
“YOU-!”
There was the briefest flash of recognition in his beady little eyes, before her world went black.
With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her fifth glimpse of the army arrayed before her. Nialla launched herself through the hail of fire, uncaring of the burn marks that marred her skin as a result. Quickly rendering his armed guard into so much meat paste, she stomped through their bloody remains to lift the brat up by the shirt collar.
“Whatever you are doing, you will cease doing it IMMEDIATELY, or I swear I will-!”
The boy, apparently unconcerned—an infuriatingly contemplative look on his face—bit his tongue of all things. Her world went black.
With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her twenty sixth glimpse of the army arrayed before her.
BOOM!
Nialla shot upward like a loosed projectile—punching through the cordon of restless soldiers, their floating platforms, and the head of one titan automata alike, in less time than it took to blink. Smattered with burns, smoking viscera, and open wounds, she raised both arms and loosed dozens of spearing tentacles, each, into the undersides of the behemoth sky vessels—the kraken’s bottomless fury, this time, the mirror of her own.
The floating islands rained down in chunks to crush the unsuspecting civilians that scurried far below. Shoving the entirety of her spirit reserves into a working of Kinetic Authority, a spherical wave of unbearable force obliterates just about everything else left standing.
With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her fiftieth glimpse of the army arrayed before her. Nialla let out a scream of incandescent fury. In the next moment, a wave of kinetic force wipes the entire city of Starlight off the map.
With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her hundredth glimpse of the army arrayed before her.
Nialla stood atop an untouched platform, the white of her rapidly healing body framed against a blackened backdrop of burning ruin. It was as if a fleet of fallen meteors had reduced the entire city to slag—leaving naught but a cratered, smoking wreck behind. Involuntarily held in a state of perfect stillness, Jun was allowed the perfect view of the utter devastation she’d wrought.
Nialla began to circle him slowly, feet making no sound on the smooth steel, hovering several inches above the platform as they were. Making a full circuit around his unmoving frame, she came to a halt directly in front of him. Shifting herself until they were staring eye to eye, she spoke.
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“What? Have you nothing to say? No miraculous return to the status quo? Surely now, with your army dismantled and your city destroyed, you have no reason to carry on humoring me. Why not just, rewind time and begin again? After all, it has availed you this far, has it not? Unless…?”
Nialla leaned in closer, speaking to him in hushed tones as if sharing a secret.
“Unless… could it be, that you cannot do so at will? Oh my,” Nialla grinned wickedly. “But wouldn’t that be very unfortunate indeed.”
Jun’s irises shook ever so slightly. The only evidence he was fighting to cast off the invisible restraints that bound him.
“Because you see, I realized something not to long ago. Something I, personally, found to be very interesting. That every time the world goes dark, and I find myself right back where I started, it is accompanied by one thing and one thing only. And it is not, as I had previously suspected, the destruction of the city which triggers it. Nor is it the destruction of your pitiful resistance. No, the one thing, the single common denominator between every incarnation I’ve experienced is none other than… mundane injury, done to your very person.”
One could visibly see his pulse rise in the throbbing of his neck veins. Blood darkening the color of his face.
“A troublesome ability, I will admit, but so long as I do not allow any physical harm to befall you…? Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? And while, sure, it will make extracting the information I need rather difficult, it will not make it impossible.”
On the inside, Jun struggled with everything he had. Meanwhile on the outside he remained that same unmoving statue. Placid to a fault and unnaturally still. His face grew redder and redder by the second.
“Did you know there are a great many ways to elicit pain without inflicting injury? I’m sure that comes as a surprise. How’s about we start with the first method on the list and work our way down from there? After we’ve sped through a couple dozen of them or so, then we’ll see if you want to tell me what I wish to know.”
Unable to withstand the mounting strain, a capillary in his left eye burst. It was enough.
|Death Strider| (Limited)
Should you wish it, you are now less likely to die from what would otherwise be a fatal injury. Conversely, should you will it, you are now more likely to die a quick and painless death, even should the wound you receive be less than fatal.
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the wretch, slamming a fist into his sternum with the whole of her spirit reserves behind it. His body was reduced to a fine red mist, while the city skyline behind him effectively ceased to exist.
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the pest. She snatched the boy up by the nape of his neck in much the same way a mother tigress might her cub. Gently, but firmly, she flew him to the top of the cities tallest skyscraper. Then, using his face as an improvised scrub brush, she scoured its shining facade of all its accumulated grime. She dug a long furrow as she went—shattering glass and breaking concrete. Dotting it quite liberally with blood and bits of brain matter all the way down.
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the brat. Palming his face, she punched the back of his skull through four consecutive office buildings before…
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the impudent-
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the-
The world went black.
Nialla appeared-
The world went black.
Nialla-
The world went black.
Nialla appeared before the boy, snapping out a devastating backhand packed with so much spirit and kinetic law that it could level mountains. Her arm moving at such ludicrously high speeds that it would appear to him as nothing so much as a sudden lapse of consciousness.
The boys head… shifts, ever so slightly. It was then reduced to its composite molecules.
The world went black.
With a start, the world came into sharp relief, and Nialla was allowed her eight-hundredth glimpse of the army arrayed before her.
How?!!
To anyone watching, Nialla would’ve appeared to simply vanish, only to then reappear elsewhere in that very same instant, fist already cocked back and ready to swing. She payed close attention to the back of the boy’s head. It couldn’t be what she’d thought it was. She must have been seeing things, surely. It was the only reasonable explanation! And yet, this time, with the whole of her prodigious focus directed at the task, there could be no mistaking it. Her stomach dropped.
There it is again!
The subtle twitch of his neck muscles. The nigh imperceptible shift of his center of gravity. And all the while his eyes remained fixed ahead, staring down at where she had been—for all the world completely oblivious to her presence. And yet…
Nialla scattered his body into a cloud of floating particles, opening her eyes to a blurry sky in the next moment, and appearing behind the boy in the moment after that.
Impossible!
This time, he managed to turn his head an entire degree before she obliterated him—eyes still affixed to the spot where she had been until the very end.
This can’t be!
Again the world faded to black. Again she awoke to a blurry afternoon. And again she appeared, to the left of the boy this time—still well outside of his periphery. His head shifted ever so slightly to the left. Nialla erased his existence before they could lock eyes.
That… that just isn’t possible…!
A deep thrill of fear pierced the red haze of her all encompassing fury. The world once more came into sharp relief. Nialla tore him in half, and so began the cycle anew.
Although speed was not her strong suit, she had still been moving too fast for a cultivator five realms above him to accurately detect. What was happening? Not even a keen sensitivity for killing intent could explain away the anomaly.
Even if, for the sake of argument, it was in any way reasonable for someone of the chi condensation realm to perceive an ascendant being’s killing intent when they didn’t wish for it to be seen, she’d also made sure to vary the direction of her intent multiple times over the course of her probing.
And not once had he fallen for a single of her feints. Somehow, using a sense she didn’t currently understand, he was reacting to her movements on a microscopic level. It was an inconceivable feat which he didn’t even seem to be fully aware of, and the simple fact of it terrified her.
