In the dark of a crevice hidden away from both time and the eyes far above, the rock creaks. Tendrils of living matter, a reaching web of roots made of gray flesh, spread through the ceiling, their ever probing stretch digging into the stone. The colony’s expansion is ignorant of the malice pouring out of the stone, the mindless expansion of the whole the only pursuit. Infinitesimal shifts within the mica build, first a dusting of sand drifting from the top of the dome buried deep beneath the surface. Pebbles fall from the eighty foot height a decade later, their rapping report against the top of a metal cylinder sparking life into the ancient enmities enclosed within.
A stone the size of a human head falls, crashing into the ancient transport turned tomb, vibration pulling prescience out of ancient hate. An eye opens inside its glass enclosure, waves of magic flying away from the skin of the creature inside, shattering its prison as it comes to wake. The Thirty Seventh falls to the floor, the ancient white ichor of its housing spilling out into the interior of the transport. Forty similar glass tubes line a single aisle that runs the length of the corroding metal tube, but The Thirty Seventh spots no signs of life from its brethren. Their corpses float, suspended in the white ichor, the passage of time having reduced their bodies to withered skeletons of tar and bone.
Cognition floods into The Thirty Seventh, its red eyes taking in everything around it, and by the time the stone outside the transport clatters to the earth inside the ancient crevice, The Thirty Seventh has left the housing area. It stalks through the transport, spindly legs of alabaster denting the old metal with each stride, seven-fingered hands wrenching open locked bulkheads that long ago lost their strength. The Thirty Seventh prays as it crashes through the transport, searching for signs of what happened, trying to find any information that its growing faculties will be able to put together, but everything is broken, the clear culprit being the passage of centuries. Even its god does not return its prayers, though The Thirty Seventh senses that the Highest has not left this world yet; there is meaning in the silence.
A single crate of enchanted feathersteel stands out in the hold, the magic enclosing the chest still active, shining panes of blue that might almost be mistaken for glass. The worn enchantments sunder at The Thirty Seventh’s touch, their potency spent trying to hold back its hand for the barest instant. Inside the crate a pool of black matter floats, suspended and shifting like a liquid. The Thirty Seventh reaches into the acidic torment of the black matter, its dissolving fingers wrapping around the solid object buried within. It pulls back its hand, the pommel of a blade coming along with it, and as the green blade of a saber emerges, the rising sword drinks up the black matter like a sponge, leaving the crate free of anything once the saber is removed. The Thirty Seventh stands for a moment in the hold admiring the glowing green saber, the same sword that its commander used once upon a time.
With a thought, The Thirty Seventh is gone from the hold, a glowing sword in its right hand and a metal container carrying annihilation and the promise of dark futures on its back. The air moves, ancient power inside The Thirty Seventh’s body coming to life in a display of amber light. The roof of the underground cavern explodes, miles of rock spotted with green and purple creepers flashing past the eyes of The Thirty Seventh as it ascends. It’s feet crash down onto a tiled floor buried beneath the crawl of moss and peat. A trifling beast, awakened by the explosion of the earth inside its chamber, races towards The Thirty Seventh, dozens of tendrils firing forth to subdue the sudden intruder. The Thirty Seventh dispatches the monster with a casual swing of its saber, sneering at the misshapen construction, its natural endowment such a laughable thing in the face of constructed perfection.
Dozens of floors explode in the passage of The Thirty Seventh, the stone and spiderweb of the colony hardly an impediment as The Thirty Seventh soars skyward. It halts when the last of the stone disappears, the face of the naked sky arresting The Thirty Seventh. It stands atop a structure in the middle of a forest, miles of the uncultivated earth spreading out around it like an anathema. Already, The Thirty Seventh feels weakness creeping into its bones, the less than a minute of activity having already drained its reserves of vital mana. Before it moves off to recuperate and regain its true strength, The Thirty Seventh pauses, the connection to the Highest opening for the barest of instants.
There is danger in the connection. The Highest’s position is made vulnerable for a brief moment, the message that it relays to The Thirty Seventh costing it dearly. Like a good son, yes, the Highest is naming The Thirty Seventh as its son in this moment, The Thirty Seventh takes in the message.
“The lines persist,” The Thirty Seventh mutters, the chords and sinews inside its throat creaking at having not been used in centuries. “I hear you Mother. Willbender, Avarice, Grace, Champion, Extinction, and Blooming Death remain.” Atop the stone structure that topped its tomb for so long, The Thirty Seventh takes a deep breath, the scents of those horrid bloodlines infusing the very air. “Your will be done.”
The Thirty Seventh vanishes, its passage unnoticed by any. It enters hibernation, taking its time, never rushing. For the undertaking to be done, The Thirty Seventh will require its full strength, the strength of its mother’s vanguard.
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I am starting to enjoy fire. The concept of enjoying the way the flames run, the light that spreads out and away from me, the act of burning itself, none of it ever occurred to me before. Now, sitting on a root in the center of my last fight’s wreckage, crunching charred leaves in my hand and enjoying the lingering smell of smoke in the air, I feel truly grateful for this power I have been given.
A field of gray ash spreads out around me, a crater in the forest floor where the body of the last Territory Bulb had been my temporary refuge from the biting wind this morning. The smell in the air is the best part of it, the tickle of scorched fungi and leaves that scratches the back of my throat with each inhale. I blow the dried crumbles of the leaf out of my hand, watching as the frigid spring wind catches the remains, carrying them off into the sky.
“I am going to need to start heading north soon,” I tell Galea.
She responds by opening a window that contains the map of the Passage. A red dot that beats like a heart marks where we suspect I am. I’m so far away from the end. “More than five hundred miles still remain until you will meet the coast,” she says.
“I know.” I sigh, looking over the map. By now, I am sure that most of the contestants will be a hundred or so miles ahead of me in this competition. The upside of hopefully not running into anybody is nice, but that won’t mean much if I fail to reach the end in time. “I should be faster than most of the others. That keeps my hopes high.” Another window appears.
Thresholds Surpassed:
Magic(1st Threshold): Reaching the first threshold in the Magic attribute has granted the magician’s own magic increased potency. If the magician’s Magic attribute significantly outclasses the Magic Defense attribute of a target, there is a chance for any magical resistance to be completely ignored. Additionally, passing this threshold grants a slight insight into magical affixes, helping the magician along their journey to true potency.
Speed(1st Threshold): Surpassing the first threshold in the Speed attribute imbues the magician with a highly increased reaction time. Additionally, basic movement such as walking, running, or climbing will no longer consume stamina.
Recovery(1st Threshold): The effects of spent Healing Points is significantly increased, allowing you to recover from more grievous injuries than naturally possible. Even some previously mortal wounds may be unable to truly end your life.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Recovery(Specialist): As a specialist in Recovery, the duration of poisons, curses, and harmful magical effects upon you are significantly reduced.
My mind returns to the books I have read through over the past two weeks that I have hunted in the woods on my own. It still baffles me that the introductory guide to being a magician states that thresholds are often something that one might manage to surpass near the end of the first rank. Most can only hope to ever get through a single threshold before they reach the second rank, but here I am, already having managed to surpass three of them. By that measure, I should be truly exceptional, but I know that my improvement is owed to the environment I have been thrown into.
Over the course of an average adventurer’s career, they might fight ten monsters a week at the most, and often that is done inside of carefully constructed parties and with clear plans in place. For those of us in the Passage, fighting monsters is a daily exercise, making our soul reinforcements come closer together than a normal magician’s. Compressing the time between soul reinforcements stops wasted effort values from going into anything other than what we use in direct combat. It is an amazing boon to our combat potentials, all of our efforts going into what we use the most in those circumstances, and it will likely lead all of us to be highly specialized coming out of the other end of this trial; especially those of us that entered with a low level.
Add to that my ability to freely utilize the energy that would be wasted on other humans in the form of Free Points, and I was primed from the start to come out with exceptional numbers in my combat attributes. If only I had been able to recognize that from the beginning.
I shake my head, not willing to spend even a moment on regret. Over the last few days, I have managed to snag and eat twenty-two of the spawn seeds. I know that there is a limit to their effectiveness; I will likely hit that limit sooner rather than later. Still, the time has been well-spent.
Charlene Devardem
Human(Level 30)(Rank 1)
Emperor Conflux
Attributes
Vitality: 45(57)
Strength: 34(46)
Magic: 269(271)
Defense: 45(55)
Magic Defense: 38
Speed: 205
Recovery: 234(290)
Perception: 35
Presence: 0
Healing Points: 570
Mana: 2710
Stamina: 1105
The task of bringing the information Galea supplies me with in line with the texts I pilfered from Arabella’s mansion isn’t the easiest thing in the world. What I have managed to figure is that level fifty appears to be the threshold for rank two, meaning that I have pushed past the halfway point. Despite that, my last few levels have been hard fought, requiring me to slay more and more monsters in order to reach the next soul reinforcement. There is a slight mention of this in the texts, that compressing soul reinforcement with slaying monsters can only help so much. The way around that is to keep fighting stronger and stronger monsters, which leaves me at my current predicament.
“So, we either head north now, or we go inside of that thing,” I say to Galea, nodding at the stone rising in front of the crater. Telling that the wall, rising twenty feet above the mushroom laden detritus is even made of stone is difficult. Small patches of muddy white rock stick out from among the budding flowers that cover the structure, each flower as big as my torso, a dizzying tableau all the colors of the rainbow.
“It may be worth investigating,” Galea says to me as I climb out of the crater. “This structure is at the heart of the Mycose’s spread.”
The description of the speed threshold was a bit disappointing. In actuality it may be my favorite that I have surpassed. There has always been in the back of my head a reluctance to expend energy, a voice questioning the need to run somewhere, to waste energy on movement, but that has vanished. It is the simplest thing now to command my body to run for hours, to jump between trees, to use branches as stepping stones; I can focus my mind on other tasks without losing an ounce of focus.
I scale a tree, my fingers working like the claws of a squirrel as I pull myself up to the first layer of branches. Crouching atop a branch, the view spreads out beneath me. The spread of the Mycose colony–as I have come to call it–covers more land than the entirety of Lord Timmian’s domain back home did. If I were to push my speed to its limits and head north from here, I wouldn’t be clear of it even after a full day of running. The trees at the heart of the colony stand like dread statues, their leaves eaten away, their branches shriveled from the climb of purple and teal fungi climbing up their trunks. The inner network of the colony spreads out beneath me, the shriveled trees letting me see for miles in any given directions. Only the Mycose, the strange monsters made of gray flesh, move about in the colorful colony lands, but their number are few.
The bulbs stand out amid the swarm of colors, huge flowers the size of cottages, twenty feet tall at the shortest, spreading green spores into the air in a constant stream, yellow tendrils like flower stamen slowly listing in the breeze above them. These are the mature bulbs. I have only killed one since I haven’t spotted any spawn seeds hanging from their fleshy petals. The mature bulbs can hardly move, relying on a mixture of toxic spores and their ability to call upon other fungi monsters in the area to defend them. They aren’t all that difficult to take care of, but they also aren’t really worth it–no spawn seeds.
Just ahead of me, in the very center of the mycose colony, stands a structure, one which’s shape was immediately recognizable. Despite the fact that it is covered with flowers of all colors, the vague pyramidal shape jutting up from the center of a walled off square brings back memories of the dungeon. Here, so far off the beaten path, another dungeons sits, waiting to be explored, covered with so much fungal growth that it would be missed if you weren’t looking for it.
I kick my feet, thinking over the dilemma again. On one hand, it was really nearing the time that I should start heading north. In the last few weeks, I have made some real progress: learning the basics of enchanting, discovering how to venture and hunt on my own, and, most importantly, finding my conviction. If I take these things with me north, I don’t doubt that I can see my way through the rest of this Passage.
On the other hand, I can’t easily pass up this opportunity staring me in the face. The mycose have been awful for pushing my enchanting any further, the gray flesh of the fungus monsters barely contains any affixed mana at all. Despite that, my growth over the last few days from the spawn seeds alone has been exceptional. If I add to that the fact that my dragonfire has been anathema to every mycose I have encountered so far, I am able to fight things much higher than I will be able to elsewhere. If what sits before me really is a dungeon, one that is not marked on the map that I got from the first dungeon, there may be a real possibility for me to complete it on my own. What pushes my decision over the edge is the prospect of finding treasure within, chief among them being clothing and armor, this shoddy bearskin shirt I made myself is already falling apart.
“We are going in then?” Galea asks.
I glance at my vital energies, finding them all fully topped off. “We are,” I say. I linger in the tree a few more moments, having Galea assist me in spotting all of the mycose monsters below. They are spaced a fair distance apart, easily avoidable.
I fly, my dash from the tree to the gap in the wall taking a scant few seconds, my feet barely touching the ground. I call upon my dragonfire to burn a line in front of me, scorching the earth free of the blooming flowers well before I reach them. The flowers do not exist outside of the stone walls, nothing else in the colony looking even remotely close to them, and I don’t intend to take any chances with them as I make my way inside.
A wave of fire races ahead of me as I move, cutting a line directly towards the pyramid in the center of the square. I stop, smothering the fire in my hands as the flames begin to uncover something at the base of the pyramid. There, erected at the bottom of the stairs that will hopefully lead up to the door, stands the decrepit remains of a four-post tent. I hurry forward, slapping the burning embers away from the already rotting posts as I look over the tent.
A table, eaten by time and a growth of small mushrooms, lays broken in the center of the tent. The canvas that once shaded the area is now marred with holes and barely clings to two of the post. Most arresting of all, an iron lockbox rests at the foot of the table. Carefully burning a path through the growth, I approach the table.
“There’s a book here,” Galea informs me, pointing down at a path of mushrooms.
When I lift the tome away, it flakes off in my hand, dust and spores spouting into the air. I toss the book aside, sighing as I burn the spores out of the air around me. “This has been here for a long time,” I say. “Do you spot anything else useful?”
“This might have been a map once,” Galea says, pointing to a bit of canvas nailed to the remnants of the table. Weather has seared away any information that might have been written upon it.
“Anything that hasn’t already been destroyed,” I say.
“None that I can see, Mistress.” The fey spirit shrugs in my direction.
I give up, turning to the iron box. The lock on the chest stands rusted and heavy, but a few smacks from the pommel of my magical dagger shatters it. I open it, coughing when a swarm of dust sprouts into the air. Despite the dirt inside, my spirits soar as I gaze inside. Sitting folded in place, resting on a pile of papers and journals, are two pairs of work clothes. Already, deciding to come here has paid off.