There are more ways than one that a man might challenge the heavens. He has made war with his arms, he has made war with his mind; so why not also with his heart? But the problem with standing against Heaven, is that you had better be ready to rise as high as your enemy stretches – and the vault of Heaven reaches beyond the stars.
Todd’s thoughts are dancing. It would be a mistake to go ring to ring to tell them how to defeat their quest. It would take time to explain, and more of it to orchestrate the duels; many of which weren’t as physically imbalanced as Candra’s and Joe’s had been. It could be tricky.
Maybe if the rings were activating less often, if the people were all behaving calmly and rationally. No, it’s better to split up, that much is obvious. It was a mistake to not figure out how the shrinking worked. How often it triggered, whether it was a constant area or radius which was being lost...
Not important. What’s important is what they can do NOW, and in this moment speed is the truer gold than foresight.
“Joe,” he says, and the young man acknowledges him without hesitation – the readiness of a general inviting the counsel of his captain. “We need to split up, but we shouldn’t start here. We have to spread out and start in like, a staggered pattern and then leapfrog, so the people we free can infill and -”
It’s a solid plan, especially on the spur of the moment. Joe and Candra, and even Randall are seeing the sense of it, even starting to consider which direction to start in.
Then the three note harmony, the electric wail of the Pixies’ flight, steals at their attention; stops them in their tracks.
“Humans of Earth!” Cries out the child of the void between stars. The three Pixies swoop down from the sky, then arc to skittering halts just overhead of the humans below. Their landing has spread the three figures out over the crowd, and the calculating part of Todd’s cortex marks how much it looks like a tactic for riot control.
Before they had flown away the first time, Todd had noticed the three identical Pixies had been adopting different personas before his eyes. It hadn’t been obvious at first, but now the effect is complete. The bookish pixie has tuned her color to favor the deep purples of star energy, her immaterial book replaced with a real one: an ancient tome bound with thin slates of dusty stone. Her body has changed form, to mimic the draping, trailing folds of a robe. Her hair is bound up in a tight bun, and there, it glows like the accretion disk of a black hole.
The giggly one is changed to a rich, electrocution pink. Out of the three, its body has remained the most human in shape, but become the least solid. The whole of its torso, arms and legs have changed to a cluster of motes, which lag a bit in formation when it moves. It gives a fluid effect to its dancing, which is eager and often. It’s bare feet have the strange, clarified definition of its hands and face, and its wild hair curls into the flashing ionic spiral trails of a bubble chamber.
Todd’s heart catches in his chest, because the lead Pixie is the one who hovers to a halt nearly overhead. She is the one changed least in appearance, but most deeply in weight and authority. Her hair streams out in the same river as before, but her color has settled into a gold-orange royalty. Her cheekbones have exaggerated in severity, and her body is covered with a coat of interlocked obsidian rings; a glittering mail.
“I see that there are warriors among you! Souls with the guts and honor of heroes!” Calls out the orange pixie, her voice carrying at a perfect level volume. “I wonder though, if it is enough?”
Her expression is piercing, measuring, threatening. It opposes, oppresses, yet insists on defiance. Todd looks over at his friends and sees them enraptured, starts to understand how they’ve been snared.
“I am the administrator designated Charlie Two Foxtrot, Four subsection A,” her severe expression softens to a smile, calculated within a micrometer to dispel fear and foster trust. “You may call me Aefore.”
“Along with my sisters,” she rises a few inches into the air and indicates generously with a gentle sweep of her hand. “Befor and Ciforre, I have been tasked with a sacred duty. A duty to you, children of Earth.”
“And the other one?” Todd finds himself saying, in a trembling voice.
“Ah, of course. Defore will be a guide to our guests, the Ishiate. I am afraid that without the binding of a common language or history, it is wiser to coordinate your Tutorials separately for now.” She raises a hand, palm outward. Todd realizes he’d been about to ask another question, and catches himself. He looks around at his neighbors, the elder Spanish woman, the Chinese pockmarked teenager, and he sees her explanation for the lie that it is.
“Before we continue, my friends, I would ask you a favor. I know that your bones are aching and your hurts are fresh, but I promise you it is important.” Her brow softens into the heartfelt charity of a mother’s concern, and Todd finds himself wanting to believe in it.
“Take this moment and look within yourselves. Seek out the truth of your self, your center,” she presses a hand against her belly, a strange location which rightly matches no organ the humans here are aware of, but makes an intuitive sense to their marrow-minds. “If you find this difficult, let the System guide you. It is the source of the script in your minds. Simply say the holy word, ‘Status’ and you will see.”
Active Quests
1. A Taste for Battle (easy): Defeat first enemy of the Tutorial. (Complete)
2. Just Window Browsing (easy): Explore the basic menu screens
a. View the Active Quests Screen (Complete)
b. View the Personal Status Screen
c. Bonus: View the Quest Rewards Screen to claim an award
Then Todd sees the familiar quest menu appear in front of him and it updates with new tasks. He sees the first item is already complete, and he wonders if it is a freebie, or whether he is progressing faster than some of the others.
Suddenly a new prompt appears and it overlays his view of the Quest screen.
ℹ︎ Quest Menu: The quest menu tracks your active System sponsored quest activities! Quests are challenging activities which push the boundaries of a Cultivator’s talent. The System generously rewards completing sponsored tests.
Be aware, some tasks have special requirements, or have limits to the time or place which they might be completed. In addition, special optional requirements are sometimes listed, which can be fulfilled for additional rewards! Finally, many tasks come with an evaluation criteria to measure how effective you were in meeting the requirements of the challenge. Please read quest descriptions responsibly to understand their criteria and conditions.
An impressive showing in a graded quest can be worth many times the base reward, so make sure to always give a hundred percent!
Wondering what to do next with your immortal Cultivation? Try a Quest today!
* Brought to you by the Department of Order, and Order associates *
If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
Each of the informational prompts appear and fade quickly, and Todd rushes to take it in. This ‘System’ must have figured out his impatience with the text scroll speed, and it is not playing around as it accommodates him.
The final panel fades, leaving him with an unanswered question about this Department of Order. He remembers some similar text for something called ‘Limitless’ on the original tutorial welcome prompt as well.
He looks around himself, and sees the others around him completely spaced out. Randall is actually reading his Quest screen aloud, though quietly, and Joe is frowning in thought. Candra shakes out of it first, searching the distracted crowd before meeting Todd’s look.
“It says I failed my first quest,” she says in a controlled, neutral tone. “Did you pass yours?”
Todd opens his mouth to respond, then shuts it. He has a sense she’s more upset than she appears. He nods cautiously instead. “Did you find your Status menu yet?” He offers to change the subject.
She winces. “No.”
“I was right about to try,” he explains, figuring it would be encouraging to tell Candra she was leading the field on their new quest.
Seeming mollified by that, Candra takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. She whispers, “Status,” and then eases into a meditative calm.
Once she’s fully focused on her task, Todd directs his attention to the large, obstructing panel which is blocking his view of the young woman. It had been annoyingly hard to look her in they eyes with the thing in the way.
Name
Todd Kalogeropoulos
Level
1
Race
F – Human
Alignment
Human (Earth)
Strength
5
Dexterity
6
Endurance
5
Vitality
6
Intelligence
8
Wisdom
4
Luck
4
Nexus Coins
0
Overall, the Status panel isn’t far from what Todd had been expecting. It was laid out like the character statistics page for a role playing game, in quantified numerical abstractions of his physical and mental potential. There are a few unexpected rows like his alignment, which appears to be non-specific to the point of uselessness. The Nexus Coins row is strange, but not impenetrable. If it’s a measure of currency, that means that the bills in his wallet don’t appear to have a value in the System. But the only two rows which worry him are his Race and his Luck attribute.
His race appears to be measured with some kind of grade, and an F at that. It almost seems like a mean-spirited dig, like saying he was somehow bad at being a person. Luck bothers him for a completely different reason. The idea that Todd might be defined by a quality which is entirely outside of his control is deeply troubling. He hates games of chance, and he hates gambling. He had always preferred the idea of failing at a difficult task under his own quality, compared to the idea of an uncontrolled risk; even if it’s stacked overwhelmingly in his favor. He hopes (but doubts) he might not have to rely on it in the future.
The Quest screen briefly appears to notify him he has completed the basic requirements of his new quest, but he dismisses it; instead taking time while inspecting his Status screen. Then as he focuses on individual elements, small informational pop-up windows appear to explain the individual rows. There are no particular surprises, but Todd is relieved to see that his species grade is not a judgement of his moral integrity.
ℹ︎ Attribute Race: There are myriad species of the multiverse who have exhibited a potential for Cultivation. While some are born naturally into power, the majority of documented species begin their lives as unrefined mortals.
The body of a mortal is, in its most natural state, poorly suited for the Cosmic Energy of Cultivation. 😀That means you! It is only through the careful, directed refinement of your physiology that you may expand your limits and achieve the stable storage, purification, and expression of Cosmic Energy.
The description is much less unpleasant than Todd had been worried it could have been, but he still has questions. The description of his Race seems to overlap a great deal with what he might have expected his Level to define, so there must be a difference. As far a he’s understood their descriptions, his Level should be a measure of his current development, which makes him feel his current species grade is a measure of the upper limit of his potential.
The description of his alignment though, is more of a surprise than he expected. The parenthetical reference to the planet Earth is to clarify his point of origin in the case of a conflict. Does that mean there are Humans out there who don’t come from the planet Earth? That possibility would shatter Todd’s understanding of the universe just as surely as anything else in this nightmare.
Finally, he sees Candra stir a bit out of the corner of his eye. He takes one last second before turning to her in case she has any questions.
“Fuck, my Wisdom stat sucks,” she says with a wry fatalism. “Really busts you in the balls seeing yourself reduced to a bunch of numbers.”
Her joking demeanor drops a shade. “God, it makes you feel like a piece of meat, doesn’t it,” she admits unhappily. Todd is inclined to agree.
As other people recover from their reverie, their attention turns back to the benign figure standing firmly in a guard position, fixed in the open air. Her shade of a smile turns up to mark her recognition of adequacy, but not excellence, before finally deciding to let the rest of the class complete this task later in independent study.
“You have begun to see, to realize for the first time, that you are weak.”
Aefore offers her hands up, and slowly begins to float down for the first time to ground level. Todd tries to control the alarm of his retreat as he stumbles backward to make space for her. As she turns to face the Humans around her, to look at them in turn, to rest with a beneficent smile, Todd shudders at the little side glances he catches her giving him and his friends.
“Make no mistake! You have courage. And you should be proud for this,” she says. “But without more power, you could not last, could not survive against the kind of enemies who come from beyond your world.”
She smiles sadly, and it turns the hearts of all who meet her gaze. “I speak of more than your physical strength, the fragility of your bodies, the way you fight,” she turns to the older gentleman locked in a ring between the people who had been trying to set him free. “Some of you are sick,” she whispers, reaching out toward him. “All of you are victims. Victims of lives which are so, very, unfairly short.”
She shakes a somber head. “Is it right that you have only been given a single century? To love, to laugh, to dream, to build? Is that not INJUSTICE?” Flaring with sudden energy, Aefore glows like fire and the crushing pressure of her anger becomes a physical force that nearly overwhelms Todd. Darkness nibbles at the edge of his awareness as he nearly loses consciousness, and then instantly the pressure is gone again.
“Before, I told you that I have come with my sisters for a purpose. I tell you now that purpose is to teach you the secrets of a sacred art,” Aefore begins rising again, just a foot or two while she continues a slow rotation. “It is the art called Cultivation. And when I say its roots are ancient, understand I mean that its history is measured in the lifetime of the stars themselves.”
A low whistle lets loose from somewhere in the crowd, and Aefore acknowledges it with a wave of her hand.
“Cultivation is the answer to all your fears, all your needs, all your dreams. It is the strength to raise up a mountain, the thirst to drink an ocean, the mind to unveil all knowledge. Cultivation will knock down the limits of what is possible, it will let you throw down your enemies, even if that enemy is death itself.”
“Did you hear me, children of Earth? I am offering you the path to eternal life.”
An earthquake of silence nearly brings hundreds of people to their knees. Todd gapes, unable to believe what he’s hearing. It’s not possible to live forever, what a ridiculous lie. But as he sees the Pixie turn towards him, he is transfixed by its attention. It sees him, sees through him. Sees through him, seeing through her and the bullshit sales pitch she rode in on.
As he shrinks back from the intensity of her, a self satisfied twinkle glimmers in her eye. He realizes in that moment that the most dangerous part of this scam is that it’s all completely fucking true.
“Congratulations on your first victory, warrior of Earth,” The woman whispers, like sweet morning sunshine. Her outstretched fist unfurls into a fragrant, life flushing aroma that girds him from his pelvis, up his spine, to his skull and out to every pore of his body. In the center of her palm is a perfect round fruit the color of wine on a wedding night and it tugs at him needfully.
“Are you not ready for the first step of your journey?” She croons enticingly, “Would you not come claim your reward?” He falters. Approaches. His hand reaches out for the Limitless’ Charity Blooming-Promise Berry, and as he does, the creature’s expression takes on the savage, merciless cruelty that no one else had seemed so far to be able to see. But he grabs it anyway, his fingers crying out with a pain like fire as they brush against hers.
He is the fish, and she is the hook.