Chapter 255 - Forced Learning

Nate sat naked in the sands of Ankh’Aris’s destructive cultivation realm, as he fought for his own survival. The blasts of sand had stripped him bald, his beautiful blond hair evaporating into nothing. His skin would be pockmarked by an errant blast of wind, or wither beneath the slightest of gusts, only to reform a moment later as Nate spent his Divine Energy, focusing on the Concept of Life as he did so. Then some sand would alight on him and he would grow scales where it landed, or have his skin change colour, or the sand would change colour and Nate would remain unaffected. 

Conceptual Insight continued to hum in the back of his mind, though it had quieted as Nate bent his own thoughts to the task of understanding the nature of his environment. Ankh’Aris might be a creature of Destruction, but Reality was a tapestry and Destruction touched on many parts of it. It was Death that withered Nate’s flesh, Destruction that left him looking like acid had been eating him. But there were deeper ideas involved. Destruction was also a form of Change, and it was Change that seemed to fill some of the sands that swept over him. Then there were whispers of other forms of Destruction. Fire, Entropy, Erosion, Ruin, Cataclysm, Loss, Waste… the list went on.

Nate had lost track of time, but every moment he recognised a new Concept, Reality would answer, trying to fill him with Divine Energy. And every time, instead of letting it go into his Class Core, he grasped at it with his mind and body, trying to push the ideas into his flesh, bone, and blood.

He couldn’t tell if he was succeeding, but the leftovers were still entering his Class Core and he was using them as quickly as they came. If Destruction was pressing in from outside of his body, then Life was bursting forth from within, and where the two met, he was dying. Destruction was winning, Life unable to fully counter its effects, and his organs, bones, and flesh were paying the price.

The idea of Life wasn’t enough for what he wanted. Nate had always known it wouldn’t be, relegating it to a stepping stone, but now he needed to make that leap and he wasn’t ready. But, he didn’t have a choice. It was now or never. As his body was slowly ruined, he went over his understanding of Life and started connecting to it, finding its place in the tapestry, following the threads to where his true heart lay.

Life, to him, was more than just organic life. It was experience. It was existence. And existence was filled with more than just organic beings. The elements making up the building blocks of existence were another piece, but they only functioned correctly within the constraints of laws. Gravity, Space, Time, all were just forms of energy. But still, there was more. With the elemental building blocks in place, the laws to govern them, and life to experience them, there were those experiences. Joy and Sadness, Anger and Love, Greed and Altruism. The emotional spectrum, all bound up within the Soul. And they all collided together in the Physical Realm, creating beauty and chaos.

Creating. His mind focused on that one point. At his heart, his Path, his choices, always came back to the core of who he was. An artist. And an artist created. For the longest of times he had thought only of his creations, but that view was flawed when considering Reality as a tapestry. To create, he needed two other pieces. All creations took up space, be it mental or physical. His ideas took up mental space, his paintings took up physical space. And for them to take up physical space, they needed to occupy an area, filling it with pieces taken from other things, destroying them in the process. Changing them. 

The Path of an artist, Nate decided, was threefold. To destroy, to find space, and to create. Filled with Divine Energy, dying as he fought against his own death by creating, he saw how Life fit into the tapestry, and with it, the piece he was missing.

The Divine Sigil hung in front of him for a moment, pushing back at the energies around him, its existence a counterpoint to the destruction raging through the realm. Nate didn’t need to see the Sigil. He knew it at the core of his being, his body's destruction halting as the new Concept settled inside of him. 

Standing slowly he looked around. Creation was always going to be the easiest for him. It was the idea closest to his heart. But that didn’t mean the others weren’t important, and for all that he had accomplished something grand, he was still just getting started. Next, he needed to understand Destruction, and to understand it, he needed to experience it. Still on timer, as he could only resist the Destruction for as long as he had Divine Energy, he began the second leg of his journey. His footsteps in the sand were erased behind him as he walked, naked, into the sandstorm, to find out just how wide the weft of destruction stretched within the tapestry of Reality. 

*************

Kiri crashed bodily into the floor, leaving a paste of flesh and blood before reforming into herself, anger and fear warring inside of her. Anger at herself, and how she just couldn’t seem to understand, and fear that she wasn’t good enough.

“I will carve these lessons into your flesh and soul if I have too!” roared Ankh’Aris, lunging at her with snapping jaws.

Kiri tried to teleport, only to find her use of soul energy instantly destroyed by the dragon Ascendant. Instead she dove backwards, rolling out of the way of arm-length incisors that closed over where she had just been.

“You touch on only the simplest of the ideas related to your Concepts! Like a child mucking about in the mud instead of bathing in the pool! What is Soul?!”

“Memories!” yelled Kiri as she threw herself to the side to avoid another attack.

A swipe of a claw followed as Ankh’Aris continued to pressure her beyond her ability to respond, “Memories?! Memories of what?! Is it memories that you use to empower yourself with?”

Kiri tried to think as the dragon pursued her relentlessly. Her daggers, all of them, had been destroyed. Her armour was in tatters, rent and ripped from claws, and was close to becoming unrecoverable, the enchanting almost damaged beyond repair. Her Skills were being shut down, destroyed before they could do anything. The only things that remained was her Imbuement and her Soul Twins.

“They’re the memories of strength, of speed, of endurance!” she countered, running behind a pillar.

Ankh’Aris whipped his tail around after her even as his snout breathed black flames around the other side. Pincered she spent Divine Energy, increasing her speed as she leapt over the tail moving back to the centre of the throne room.

“Wrong! Just wrong! Soul energy may be filled with memories, but that is not what it is! Think you stupid child or I will stop playing this game and eat you! Do you want me to eat you? Is that why you refuse to see?!”

Kiri was running again, the dragon in hot pursuit as it played with her. Its destructive presence and anger washing over her as she tried to evade it, thoughts of attacking completely absent. But no matter what, her mind kept coming up blank. She didn’t know how to answer Ankh’Aris’s question. The dragon yelled again as it slapped her across the room with a casual sweep of its tail.

“Who has soul energy?”

“The living,” Kiri answered and instantly knew she was wrong. “No…no…”

She paused, her split mind coming together to focus on the question. The dragon loomed over her, maw open, ready to strike. It wasn’t just the living, she realised. Frick had soul energy. She had always known that, but she had also always considered him a living being. But he wasn’t. Not really. Then there were the demons Nate had mentioned. They weren’t really living either, closer to Spirits than people or beasts or trees. Yet they also possessed soul energy, or something very similar at least.

“...it is experience?” she wondered out loud.

“Finally, we are getting somewhere,” hissed Ankh’Aris. Then he slapped her across the room hard enough to break her legs.

*************

Frick ran. A smart goblin knew two things. When to eat, and when to run. His initial attacks had been going so well. He had found himself able to take down multiple roaming bands of demons, consuming them and in the process shifting his alignment towards the demonic energies. It was a start, but he was far from where he needed to be. His attacks however had not gone unnoticed.

Those he had consumed were weak. Little more than fodder within this realm, fodder or workers. Not that Frick cared about punching down. He wasn’t a Divine after all. He was in the mortal strata and he could slap anyone he wanted to. Slap and eat. It was the eating the demons had taken issue with it seemed.

Now a band of hunters was on his trail, and these ones were not pushovers like the weaklings he had targeted. The Horde was excellent against masses of enemies, especially weak ones. It however tended to struggle with a small number of powerful individuals. A weakness Frick was well aware of, and had he been with Nate, he could’ve used the Boss’s Skills to offset that weakness. But the Boss wasn’t here, and he was cut off from him by whatever that scaly bastard had done. So, Frick was on his own, and so he did what a goblin always did when faced with enemies he couldn’t handle. He ran.

The desolate landscape blurred by him as he ran, the whoops of the hunting demons mounted on hellhounds baying in the distance. What would Nate do, Frick wondered, before smiling. Boss would set a trap. Frick began making plans.

*************

Nate stood before a charred piece of shattered tile that sat atop a pile of black sand. The Concept of Ruin crashed against him, the Divine Artifact warping its surroundings. This realm that Ankh’Aris had sent him to was larger than Nate had first expected. He had walked for almost a day before he found this one piece. This one shard of Truth. The environment had changed as he got closer. At first there had been pillars of black stone that stretched into the darkness above, but as he got closer those same pillars became smaller and fractured, until they were little more than piles of shards, before finally being nothing but dust. That dust upon which Ruin sat.

The artifact tried to Ruin Nate, the energy hitting him and fracturing against him, even as Creation put him back together. The pain was constant at this point and it took five pieces of Nate’s mind to manage it so he could focus on the meaning. So he could garner understanding. As he stood and watched the cracked tile destroy its surroundings, a shadow snaked out of the sandstorm, joining him.

“I took this from the rubble of a once great civilisation. They produced Ascendants, even before Kali’Terra’s arrival. Then, one day, their Emperor, the greatest of their number, tried to bend Reality to his will. He had gathered his greatest servants and warriors together, along with a piece of Truth that resonated with Power. And then he tried to make it a part of himself. But he drank too deeply. Power wasn’t enough. He wanted Dominance. He wanted to rule this Reality. He wanted Control. And it was too much for him to contain. When it tore him apart, it took his entire planet with him. This tile was where he stood when it happened.”

“Is there a lesson there?” asked Nate.

“For you? Yes. Have I shaken your Path? See what happened to a powerful Ascendant who craved power over Reality. See the price of his hubris.”

Nate considered the story the dragon had told him. Like so many other stories Nate had both heard and experienced, he saw a familiar thread within it. The Emperor had sought power, sought control. Always it seemed to come back to greed. That endless need some possessed to have more. No matter how much more they obtained, it was never enough, a black hole of need that could never truly be sated. And as always, it was others who suffered for their desires. Was Nate like that? He didn’t think so. In fact, he was sure he wasn’t.

“He wanted control,” Nate replied evenly. “To be outside of Reality. I want to work within it. To change it in ways that reveal its Truths.”

“Perhaps,” hissed Ankh’Aris. “We shall see, and if you fail, then perhaps I shall have another piece to add to my collection. I wonder what it shall resonate with. Hubris perhaps? The destruction of self.”

Nate didn’t know how long he stood there, drinking in the nature of Ruin even as it destroyed him. The destructive nature of the realm made it hard to track time. However long it was, Nate finally reached a point where he didn’t feel like he was learning anything new. As he started walking away he was surprised when the dragon joined him.

Since he had company, he decided not to waste it.

“What is mana?” he asked.

“I do not know,” admitted Ankh’Aris, the dragon matching his pace. “But I have my suspicions. It interacts with all four energies, empowering them. It reinforces Concepts, strengthens Spiritual Energy and deepens Celestial and Demonic energies. I think it is the distilled energy of one or more Realities, combined into a whole. I think Kali’Terra’s master and his people reached the pinnacle of what was possible within their Reality, and so consumed another Reality to empower their own. But I do not know. It is just a thought, a guess.”

“Are they so powerful?” Nate wondered out loud.

“One of them could erase the Heartlands. Two of them? The Wild Realms. Three? This Reality. But they are few and, it seems, the ones who survived their little experiment wish to try and repair the damage they have done. But I could be wrong, and they could come to our Reality tomorrow and destroy it. Does knowing that change anything?”

“No,” Nate answered, trudging through black sand that ate away at his feet. “Change is inevitable.”

His words carefully chosen had the desired effect as Ankh’Aris smiled, baring shining, ivory teeth, “I knew you would understand. Keep going little artist. I want to see the world you will paint when you finally grasp that which you seek.”

Then the dragon faded into the sandstorm.

Nate continued to trudge forward, the obsidian pillars of stone slowly returning to the landscape, little though he could see. But as he continued, their shapes began to shift from pillars into abstract forms, rearranging in his peripheral vision. Change was coming, and Nate marched towards it dutifully, leaving a trail of blood behind him that vanished almost as quickly as it appeared.