"There it was that I recognised the deception, that Glory is not something awaiting us Beyond—that man's Fate-Assigner is Here: blowing lives into the abyss like dandelion seeds, until the winds of death curled back and swept Her away, too."
Nine months into The Death Training, Henry finished his deconstruction of the gauntlet.
For every variation of its 48 stages, he built statistical models predicting the chance of a replica surviving based on its talents and experience. Through this data, he determined precisely who succeeded in a stage and why. Not all of the bottlenecks, he discovered, killed trainees equally. Some favoured geniuses in minion management, some geniuses in climbing obstacles, and some geniuses in being assigned a safer starting position.
The data gave him a clearer picture of War-Priest Kemenrang's research.
Although her statistical toolkit had been cruder than his, she'd chosen variations of each stage whose success was more influenced by talents that aligned with The War Priest's Duty and less by random luck.
The result had been a modest improvement over her peers. When Henry'd simulated historical Death Trainings with his replicas, the best program prior to her averaged 4.8 non-killed graduates per 10,000 participants. Of those 4.8, he ranked 2.3 as 'praiseworthy' because they could defeat him when he consumed eight doses of The Poison of Mercurial Debilitation. In contrast, Kemenrang's top program averaged 9.7 graduates per 10,000 with 7.1 praiseworthy.
Thus, Kemenrang had improved The Death Training
Curiously, Henry's simulation of her best program produced a graduation rate only a third of that which she'd reported. This discrepancy hinted at the use of additional assistance beyond The Death Training itself – a bit of cheating.
"I wish to join the Glory-Assigned, the saints, and The All-Mother: I wish to gouge out my eyes with The Beyond and blind myself to The Here. To the tortured, I would give rebukes for unfaithfulness, to the dying and the dead; and to those who can complain of hunger, I would stuff their bellies with my insubstantial words."
At the tail end of Kemenrang's career, she'd experimented with The Death Training's longitudinal structure. The stages were laid throughout the gauntlet in a masterful balance, with early, simpler sections testing and training skills necessary to pass later, more challenging parts. She'd hoped to manipulate this deeper learning structure to advance The Death Training further.
But her story came to an abrupt conclusion there.
After a resurgence of religious nationalism in 873 B.P., the War-Priest was executed along with the rest of Abhaya's dissident faction. Her obsession with The Death Training had played a vital role in the administration's downfall, public trust having been ruined after revelations she'd sacrificed 2.6 million slaves for her research. In an ironic twist, the theocrats who took power, despite proclaiming loyalty to their dead God, cancelled The All-Mother's Death Training for being an unjustifiable waste of healthy slaves.
Henry, having obtained all he could from War-Priest Kemenrang, now left her in his wake as he climbed beyond. Although her voice faded behind him, his ears weren't silent yet, for she'd merely been one of the last speakers in a morbid conversation that'd extended far back into the ages.
"By dying, they prove their poor faith."
—High-Magistrate Psiko of Suchi (1254 - 1106 B.P.), writing on The Death Training in The Fulfilment of Higher States of Duty.
Having thoroughly familiarised himself with The Death Training, Henry began combing stage variations into a gauntlet that outputted the highest quality of 'graduates'.
Immediately, he utilised his biggest advantage, his lack of resource constraints. Historic Death Trainings, to save on the cost of rearing the gauntlet's monsters, included bottlenecks with no other purpose than to thin out the slave numbers. Kemenrang's hadn't been an exception.
By eliminating these bottlenecks, his first custom program spat out 81 graduates per 10k, out of which 17 were praiseworthy.
A tiny bit better.
"I ask myself: Why is it that only some slaves live? Why are only some selected from the thousands and Assigned to Glory? Our critics maintain that there is no Cosmic order behind their demise or that we magistrates Assign it ourselves. If such an explanation can satiate the blasphemers, it is insufficient for those Dutiful who've laboured with us on The Death Training, because they know that what is dealt to the one slave is dealt to us ten-thousand-fold. There is no pleasure in killing. No human heart could withstand dispensing so much."
—High-Magistrate Menangis of Abhaya (1491 – 1406 B.P.) in Beneath The Depths of Death.
After a week of further adaptation, Henry'd made a program with 64 graduates per 10k, 20 of whom were praiseworthy. In order to better teach the top-end trainees, the overall difficulty had been raised, causing fewer replicas to graduate.
"Death is a necessary and wondrous blessing, preventing the faithless soul from suffering within an undutiful Cycle and furthering its suffering into The Beyond."
—High-Magistrate Kekayan of Sokgyemant (1864 – 1688 B.P.) in Motherly Maxims.
Two more weeks later, he could produce 47 graduates and 21 praiseworthy per 10k. This seemed to be nearing the absolute limit possible through recombining existing stage variations.
He found Kemenrang's cheat.
"But let there be no illusions: it is not that a 'Glory-Made', an agent without Fate who has escaped The Cycle or been born without a Mother, submitted that treatise with its heretical defamations of Her teachings. The secrets contained within, which I will remind the Glory-Waiting could read as well, had been channelled to me through the author by an agent much mightier than any mortal. The All-Mother herself had possessed them and expressed Her teachings through their pen, The All-Mother who continues to nurture us from The Beyond. The author was also the child and instrument of Her plans. We are all Her will incarnate!"
—The Bone-Vagabond (890 - 475 B.P.) in Training and Teaching.
In the writings of War-Priests who'd graduated from her programs, he'd encountered repeated mentions of a pamphlet secretly circulated amongst the slaves. The anonymous author had given an explicit overview of the skills required to become a War-Priest. They'd also listed crude drills to prepare for the tricky stages. The slaves, guided by the author, had progressed further through The Death Training than they would have otherwise.
A copy of the pamphlet was stored in the mouldy recesses of Henry's Mental Library. Reading it, he recognised instantly from the prose style that the writer had been none other than War-Priest Kemenrang herself, who must have spread the pamphlet on her own, providing a cheat-sheet to her own exams.
Through this act of self-sabotage, he felt he understood her slightly more.
"Life might belong to you. It could have belonged to the dead, too. No doubt there are Glory-Waiting who could have become Glory-Assigned by reading this work: do not fear to gaze honestly at it, for it shows you what is Here – it is The Beyond that conveys nothing. There will be no prize Waiting for you in death. The conditions under which you do and do not escape the labyrinth, I know them intimately. You must be beyond perfect to have so much as a chance of success, of rejecting 'Fate'. You must be accustomed to living on mountains – to ignoring the distracting attachments to ephemeral companions and the deafening noise of false faith. You must become paranoid, you must never question whether what you see is safe or deadly - those who survive will instead ask who is trying to Unmake me and how."
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
—Anonymous, The Will To Survive.
But, eventually, the dedicated climber must tread on alone. As Henry ascended to The Death Training's highest altitudes, the shouts of those who'd stumbled below faded away, and all he could hear was his own singular breath gasping at the thin air, the crunch of his feet stomping down upon the mountain's virgin snow.
Having stuffed his digital neurons with every iteration of every stage, he began creating his own stages, synthesizing the best of the past into an optimal ideal. Each stage, he divided into a sequence of mini-steps consisting of separated monster groupings. His replicas acting as testing dummies, he fine-tuned a challenging but not impossible difficulty progression curve through these steps. When The Death Training's standard bestiary was inadequate for his purposes, he, who'd explored the entirety of Saana, added monsters unseen by any Rangbitan eyes.
Unfortunately, a cheat sheet like Kemenrang's was ruled out due to the replicas' inability to read. He did, however, manage to integrate the principles of extra-assistance by using painted indicators to resolve ambiguities and visually clue to a stage's demands.
After all that, his Death Training outputted 140 graduates per 10k with 36 praiseworthy.
Not bad.
In time, he achieved a level of design prowess where he could confidently pick any War-Priest skill, a degree of aptitude in it, and make a stage from scratch within minutes testing it accurately. This ability allowed him to now rework the gauntlet's longitudinal structure, as Kemenrang had tried and failed.
The rare individual who reached this point drilled into the core of The Death Training, to see beyond what it demanded to what it gifted.
Here, beneath the veneer of mass, wanton death, one came face to face with the cruel ethos with which The All-Mother had first designed her training. Push the slaves too little, and they learn nothing; push the slaves too hard, and they unlearn everything; the only consideration is the cream of the crop. Still, it was no easy feat to take ten-thousand people and whittle them down to a handful of war-ready savants, no more, no less. Whatever one's opinion of The Death Training's architect, one had to express admiration for the finesse with which she'd engineered the diabolical program. What's more, if historical accounts were accurate, she'd created it in three days on a whim.
Truly, in good, evil, and all matters beyond, the Gods eclipsed the rest of them. To dare to try best these powers, you had to have at least a touch of madness.
Or a hyperbolic-time chamber hat with infinite testing dummies.
Henry, tossing The All-Mother's underlying structure into the garbage bin, shuffled the points at which The War-Priest's Duty fundamental skills were learned into a more efficient order, moving the training for some skills earlier in the gauntlet while pushing others later.
For skills like movement prediction with difficult execution, he increased the number of corresponding stages so that replicas could devote extra practise to them. For skills like adjusting to troop losses that demanded flexibility, he diversified the challenges to keep the replicas on their toes. For skills like melee-fighting that were unrelated to War-Priests, he reduced their stages or removed them completely.
Certain War-Priest skills hadn't been taught by The Death Training at all, such as coordinating with living troops or employing mixed unit tactics with the Necromancer's diverse skeleton types. For these, Henry created brand new, advanced stages. Since the replicas needed to be a higher Tier to control more diverse skeletons, he had to replace The Death Training's existing monsters with higher-level analogues, which he did.
And so he produced 245 graduates with 63 praiseworthy.
A year and a half into this 'martial art' session, he'd extended the original Death Training, which had been restricted to Tier-0, up to Tier-5.
Since The War-Priest's Duty was a dead style outside of The Death Training, he reconstructed its advanced techniques from Old Rangbitan source material. Many of these sources had predated The Death Training, from a time when the martial art was taught in a more traditional, guru-protégé manner. The tactics were therefore often ill-suited to the state of Saana's current wars, so he updated them according to his Commanding experience.
At some point, he'd also added the entire gauntlet concept to the trash. Having reached the limits of that simple, linear format, he'd reconfigured The Death Training into a branching system of stages, with optional branches that contained extra drill-work depending on a trainee's abilities and prior knowledge.
And so he produced 907 graduates with 82 praiseworthy.
Finally, when he crested The Death Training's summit, he transcended death itself.
To live or to die, he realised, this was an absolute trash method for measuring progress. This binary indicator couldn't possibly capture the wide spectrum of skill with its many shades of incompetence. So he devised an alternative, composite performance score synthesised from six indicators including how fast a trainee could complete a stage and the remaining healthpool of their skeletons. With his superior measure, one could more accurately pinpoint a trainee's individuals weaknesses and strengths and, in turn, determine which stages they should repeat or skip in their personalised journey to self-improvement.
Training by death? Preposterous. Only moronic NPCs from a moronic culture in a moronic game developed by morons for morons could invent such a moronic idea.
Thus, Henry improved The Death Training.
The final day allocated to studying The War-Priest's Duty. A battlefield, where two Bloodmancer replicas were duelling.
BH-3 was stationed inside a small hillfort. A reptilian Crusader, a replica of Apostle Bian's Infernal Commander, blocked the exit with its shield. BH-3's lifeless gaze peering out over the battlefield, it directed its skeletal minions as they sprinted from defensive structures and engaged the enemy Bloodmancer's troops.
Its opponent, NB-17, was taking a more active role. On the battlefield, it stalked around from fight to fight, using its spells to assist its troops. Its Infernal Commander, an Earthfriend type, was fighting elsewhere, harassing BH-3's skeletons with spells, disrupting their formation as a bear, and retreating when in danger to heal.
In an unspectacular fashion, BH-3's force was dismantled minion by minion, and the duel ended with its loss.
Flying high around above, Henry nodded in admiration of his own brilliance.
The defeated BH-3 was an exact reproduction of Apostle Bian Han on the day they'd perished. NB-17, meanwhile, was a no-name replica who'd graduated from Henry's finalised drill training system. In merely three weeks under The All-Cripple's Invincible Training, the nameless Besalaadan had been reshaped into a bonafide War-Priest capable of defeating their former, centuries-old master.
"And they say I'm not a humanist," Henry spoke in utter disbelief.
Indeed, having transcended death, hadn't he created equality amongst men? Slave, priest, noob, minion, or king, anyone could receive the divine blessing of self-improvement through repetitive drills assuming they could afford The All-Cripple's Invincible Training's modest price tag.
Continuing to nod in self-satisfaction, he flew around the battlefield. Below him, duels were taking place between not just War-Priests, but also Nilkan Freerunners, Sacred Warriors, Grass Dragon Masters…
He hadn't stopped at The War-Priest's Duty. Oh no. During this study period's final months, he'd formulated All-Cripple's Invincible Trainings for SIX of the other martial arts. As with the first, he'd deconstructed the styles into their fundamental principles and fine-tuned befitting monster-exercise-drill systems by tormenting the replicas. Thereby, he'd practised for that distant day when he would finally invent The All-Cripple's Invincible Training (A Thousand Tools Edition) - the supreme drill exercise system for the supreme martial art! (Technically, the public version would be less supreme because these results reflected blatant superhuman, digital shenanigans.)
Anyway, with The Death Training completed, it was time to move on to more thrilling matters.
Over these past years, Henry's flirting with extreme pain had yielded an unexpected benefit of increasing the authenticity with which he wrote death scenes for his bold conquest of litera—
...
Mutambi Death-Grappling.
After that morbid death episode, Henry relaxed with a light-hearted 2.8-year study of the next martial art, Mutambi Death-Grappling.
The Death-Grapplers were fanatical Crusaders who wandered Saana's battlefields, pouncing upon dying soldiers and carrying them to safety. Then, after the rescuees were feeling grateful for being grappled away from death (Death-Grappling), the Death-Grapplers would try to convince them to convert to worshipping their patron God, Mutambi.
Mutambi was a weird guy. His cult had actually been present in Saana I, II, and III, the God himself re-propagating the practice from his residing place in the Cosmos. Usually, Mutambi's following was tiny because new recruits tended to perish attempting their own rescue-conversion missions. However, whenever players were in the game world, the cult experienced a revival, the style being beloved by both anti-war hippies and daredevils who enjoyed the Frogger-like game of retrieving the wounded in the midst of a battle.
As a side-note: back in Saana II, Henry'd stolen Mutambi's shoes, which gave the wearer superspeed. The God had formed a slight grudge against him because of this.
Stylistically, Death-Grappling was a healing art without attacks because Mutambi forbade bloodshed. Practitioners had therefore evolved a delightful mixture of evasive manoeuvres, shield-use, and literal grappling to fend off soldiers mistaking them for enemies. Since Death-Grapplers operated solo, the style was superior for 1v1 duels than most healing arts, which were group-based. Hence, Henry's decision to learn it.
In the years that he grappled with Death-Grappling, he made special use of his previous grappling with The Death Training. Through his drill design expertise, he was able to tailor-make Frogger retrieval scenarios that kept him hovering at the sweet-spot of training, where one's limits are constantly being pushed, where one feels not yearly, not monthly, not weekly, but daily gains!
And when he concluded the Death-Grappling climb, he estimated that this optimised drills had accelerated his mastery of the martial art by a whopping 144%. That was after already factoring in the doubling of his learning speed from Floating Leaf.
Beautiful.
He'd also continued to experiment with technique synthesis for A Thousand Tools. One cool creation was—by combining Death-Grappling's wounded retrieval techniques with Hardman Handaxe, Grass Dragon, Jaguar Fang, and