The first, immediate doubling of gravity barely affected Cyril through his preparations. Threads of nebulous purple qi rotated about his body in calm eddies; their attempts to settle upon him failed upon encountering his own aura, a shimmering veil of earthen hues and esoteric undertones.
His protection was multilayered, a compounding effect generated through the minor resistance to Gravity he had gained from ascending to the Dominion’s Second Sphere, reaching Middle Condensation Stage, and his Mass Reinforcement. Together, they formed a curious trifecta of protection.
Ascending to the Middle Condensation Stage was the first real step on the path to heaven for a cultivator. As one progressed through the realms, their metaphysical presence grew stronger, leaving a greater imprint upon reality. Their existence alone formed a barrier against invasive qi and other insidious energies. The process of ascending culminated in fusing one’s physical and spiritual bodies until their channels became as real as their own flesh and blood. A cultivator’s body transcended the sum of its parts, defying the physical earth and the conceptual heavens.
And, of course, since Cyril’s spirit contained the unfathomable essence of Behemoth, reaching Middle Condensation meant that he had taken the next step in integrating the Titan into his own physical existence. He was far from truly becoming Behemoth, despite Lanazael’s double-edged warning about his fate, but it was enough for him to shrug off the increased pressure.
The second step brought him up short. It felt as if a heavy shawl had been draped across his shoulders. Outside of the mild discomfort, the next level offered no real obstacle for him. The reason he paused was to better analyze the flow of Gravity qi through the steps, and the arcane currents it drifted through. He knew he still had not discovered the true nature of the Trial of Seven Steps, but they offered some insight, like observing the shadows along the ground in order to understand the layout of a room.
The third step threatened to lower his chin, attempting to force his head into an unwilling bow in the direction of the temple. Gritting his teeth, Cyril kept his shoulders squared and head held high. A prison of Gravity qi flickered around him, the energy flowing so thick that its prescribed channels looked like solid bars.
He lingered for a moment, wondering at the mechanism behind the trial. The steps must have been laid down by an array master, an expert capable of arranging formations that channeled energy into organized patterns. Arrays took the place of a cultivator, forcing qi through an artificial spiritual network in a crude approximation of a person channeling a technique. Hosjin, or one of his lieutenants, must have been skilled in the art and imbued their own Gravity technique into the formation.
All of this had existed beyond his limited perception during his last attempt. Investing over a thousand points into Gravity and improving his spirit had made him aware of the truth around him.
How, then, did a god perceive the world? A nexus of conflicting qi, housing a sea of countless souls? He suspected that without the necessary foundations, such a vision would shatter a mortal’s mind. In a way, cultivation was a journey to reach the point where one could both fathom and manipulate the underpinning fabric of reality according to their whims.
Once his study of the Gravity prison around him was complete, he ascended to the fourth step, passing through the bars of purple qi as if they didn’t exist.
His head bowed immediately, shoulders slumping. Exhaling slowly through his teeth, he slowly let himself drop into a crouch, supporting himself on the tips of his fingers. He could have resisted, but if he intended to make it to the top, he had to abandon his hubris. This trial was designed to keep the unworthy trapped in the dark. It was not meant to be easy. He had to pace himself.
The Gravity qi around him had taken on a new dimension, quite literally. While before it seemed as if he had been trapped within a cage, he now saw that the qi stretched through impossible geometries, his mind blurring once he attempted to focus on certain intersecting lines and corners.
Cyril dismissed his bronze plate armor, shedding well over fifty pounds of useless weight. Losing the armor helped, but his jaw ached and his heart was pounding in his chest. Studying the bizarre, intersecting lines that formed the complex array around him had lost much of its appeal. He scribbled a few rough depictions of the matrices on one of his final pages of Mind Scroll before moving on. His knuckles and neck popped as he forced himself to his feet.
The moment he set foot on the fifth step, it felt as if every bone inside his delicate slipper was on the verge of shattering. Gritting his teeth, he hauled the rest of his body onto the next frontier.
Countless threads of Gravity qi weaved an endless tapestry around him. They connected everything, an infinite number of translucent strands that dyed the world around him purple. He could barely lift his head, and his body was compressed down into a kneeling position. Ligaments and tendons throughout his body protested. Pain flared in his legs and back and arms as muscle strained to separate from bone.
Groaning, he circulated Gravity qi into his forehead, activating his domain. He ignored the physical agony, retreating into the back of his mind long enough to concentrate the domain around him. Then, instead of increasing the pressure around him, he reversed the flow of qi, directing the technique up and outwards in defiance of brutal forces attempting to grind him down into the earth. It was not a true reversal of gravity, moreso a rough alteration in the domain’s directional field. He had experimented with the Pressure Cantrip, applying it in different vectors, and relied on those memories to help turn the domain into a continuous, outward Pressure.
It was like holding up a shield against a tidal wave, but, miraculously, it helped. The force immediately relented, from unbearable to crushing.
Even after advancing to Middle Condensation, the sloppy change in direction wasted a tremendous amount of qi. His core drained before his eyes. No time to examine the array now. He had to move up. Quickly, before the mortar and pestle of the trial crushed him into bonedust.
Agony flared in his forehead from the mental strain of abusing his domain in such an unintuitive fashion. He moved through instinct and sheer determination, forcing his prosthetic hand onto the sixth step.
The darkalloy held up remarkably well, considering. A slight depression formed on the back of the hand, slowly and steadily caving inward. Grimacing in anticipation of what was about to happen to his poor flesh, he forced himself up onto the sixth, rolling onto it fully.
Immediately, he felt as if Behemoth itself was stepping on him. Gritting his teeth, he flooded more and more qi into his Gravity domain. His gums bled, filling his mouth with the coppery taste of blood. A curious scratching sensation spread across his eyes, as if his corneas were being scrubbed with sand.
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He couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. He stared up at the dark ceiling, through a lens of ethereal purple qi, his vision growing darker and darker. The cold, logical part of his mind that remained in the calm of the storm understood, beyond the infinity complexity of the formation, what the creator of the array was attempting to teach him.
Gravity connected all objects with mass. It was an innate force, a property of all existence, that linked and interacted in an incomprehensible exchange of pressure and resistance. Material objects maintained a tenuous balance that helped form the skeleton of the material world, and without it, physical reality would drift away from itself, dissolving into entropy.
That epiphany, that moment of clarity, blazed across his mind. He could feel the balance of his soul tipping, on the verge of reaching the Third Sphere of Gravity. That fell within expectations--he had left himself some room for the Dominion to improve without triggering a breakthrough, which would cascade into a secondary ascension in the Dominion of Knowledge. He suspected if that happened, he would become a stain on the sixth step long before he broke out of the visions.
Alright, that’s enough of that, he told himself, laying his palm flat at his side against the stone of the sixth step. Half of the qi remaining in his core surged out, manifesting beneath him as an upraised platform of E-grade bronze. It unceremoniously dumped him onto the seventh step before the gravity flattened it back down.
Truthfully, he had hoped to reserve that little maneuver to throw him past the final step and beyond, skipping the last part of the tribulation, but he had underestimated the compounding effect. Or overestimated himself.
Still, he never once thought about turning back.
What a ridiculous way to die, he thought.
He expected the pressure of the seventh step to knock him unconscious. Instead, against his expectations, he found himself lifted into the air, drifting upward as if grasped in the hand of a curious god. Pressure swept through his domain as if popping a bubble, besieging his body from all sides, all angles. He felt as if he was being crumpled into a ball, joints dislocating in a disgusting fusillade of cracks and pops.
He closed his eyes, his vision darkening. How easy it would be to surrender.
But that moment of clarity, that insight, burned like a beacon within the tempest of his mind. As his body suffered, his thoughts crystallized. He could see it, feel it, the interaction of the Mass qi Reinforcing his body and the immutable tide of gravity. Everything under the heavens, united in competition.
Groaning, he circulated the technique to reverse his Mass, in defiance of the crushing pressure around him. Slowly, by degrees, he unwound his body against the savage forces, limbs straightening.
It seemed so obvious now. He had thought, foolishly, that Lightening his own weight would make Gravity effect him more, but how could that be true? Had he not shed his bronze armor because of the additional weight? Yet he had thought his flesh and blood somehow different, when it followed the same rules as everything else. That piece of the puzzle helped reveal the synergy between Gravity and Mass. The discordance.
Worse than the physical agony was the strain of maintaining his domain and Lightening himself. It was like bathing in ice and fire. And, as a third point, the Mass Reinforcement throughout his body. He hovered there for minutes. Hours. On the precipice of unconsciousness and brilliance. The pressures of the seventh step massaged and battered his body, kneading it, molding it. He was like a piece of metal, struck over and over by a blacksmith’s hammer into the perfect shape.
Finally, he collapsed onto the seventh step, a hurricane of conceptual energies raging about him. Then, suddenly, all of the pressure vanished. Normal gravity reasserted itself.
Cyril opened his eyes, gasping for breath.
In front of him, an amethyst the size of his fist stood upon a plinth, just beyond the edge of the seventh step. Tiny cracks spiderwebbed throughout the gemstone that had been powering the arrays. A moment later, it imploded into a fine purple powder.
Layers of concentric magic circles flared into existence around the platform, thousands of unfamiliar runes dancing along the rings, then died off as the array expended the last of its energy.
Cyril chuckled once, then coughed out a mouthful of blood from his torn throat. So, in the end, he had outlasted the trial. He had hoped to casually stroll to the top, but there was a grim satisfaction in grinding down the formation before it could grind him down.
His body felt…different. Light and heavy. One with the earth, and one divorced from it completely. He blinked down at the ground, exhausted, waiting to recover from the ordeal. Gradually, the aches and sprains became a faded murmur in the back of his mind. It took another couple minutes for his full rationality to reassert itself.
Gods, he hurt.
Groaning, he forced himself to his feet and looked about. Beyond the plinth containing the destroyed amethyst lay the first floor of the temple. He stepped through the ornate entranceway, its frieze decorated with contorted figures embracing one another.
The temple consisted of a single, wide-open floor with an exit far in the back. Carved into the ground were depictions of what he assumed were the people of Beljeza, casually interacting with one another--bartering over wares, walking together, brawling, drinking. No legendary mythos or cosmological puzzles. Just the citizens of the city, living peacefully beneath the Oracle’s all-seeing gaze.
Cyril shook his head and approached the coffin in the center of the room. Blue and purple flower petals formed a thick bed of cushioning, fresh and aromatic. Upon it lay a tiny skeleton, its hands crossed over its ribcage where its heart once beat. He had discovered the final resting place of High Priestess Anadei.
Again, he was awed by the tyrant's cruelty.
Lanazael appeared at his side, identical in stature to the perfectly-preserved skeleton. He stood there for a long while next to the ifrit-woman, silent, his bloody eyes downturned. Lanazael was the first to move, brushing the fingers of one hand along the skull's jaw. Then she drifted past the coffin containing her lost sister, toward the dark exit in the back of the room.
He followed her through the black portal, silent. It led to a tunnel, gently sloping upwards, reinforced with rusted iron like Hosjin’s other paths. For minutes he walked, half focusing on the bizarre changes to his body, half wondering at the cruelty he had witnessed within the Underdark. With each step, his body alternated between feeling heavy as stone and light as a feather.
Eventually, he noticed a fine layer of sand coating the tunnel. He sent his illuminating Flicker farther ahead until he caught sight of the exit. Soft beams of moonlight drifted down into the tunnel, passing through Lanazael’s spiritual body as if it being refracted through water.
Cyril sped up until he was nearly sprinting. He caught up with Lanazael as she paused at the exit. Scrambling past her, he emerged through the hole in the ground, sand shifting beneath his feet. The cool night breeze wafted past him, and he took his first, deep breath of fresh air in a long time as he stood upon the desert once more.
Above them, in the infinite heavens, countless stars twinkled. The moon glared down at them like a profane eye, its cold light washing over the dunes and sandstone outcroppings. It was real.
He was free.
Cyril collapsed to his knees, grasping a handful of sand and letting it sift between his fingers.
Beside him, Lanazael did not react. She merely stared up at the brilliant constellations overhead. They waited together in companionable silence as the spirit began to dissolve into twinkling motes.
Cyril muttered a silent prayer of thanks and guidance as he observed the process of Lanazael untethering herself from the material plane. Within a minute, it was over. He knelt alone in the desert, his face blank, joy gone.
High above, a new star appeared, shining bright throughout the heavens.