It was funny, watching them realize how weak I truly was. Without magic and without mana, in the presence of antimagic, I was nothing more than a frail half-drow who could tinker with shadows. I could tinker death if death was around me. With no void nearby to grasp onto, however- or at least we thought, my progenitors had no choice but to lead me down the undead path.

I was one of the darker children of the Nox after all. Born a Shadow Necromancer, and more.

Glorious as that may sound, it required me to learn to ignore pain and suffering. Both on my part and others. It required me to toe the line with death over and over and over again. For years and years against the Necro King and his army. That, and much much more.

‘To learn the limits of my flesh and to prepare me for the worst of war.’

Not knowing the true reason behind my training, that was the answer I came up with to settle my mind. I trained relentlessly, and in turn, trained my subordinates relentlessly. I scratched the iceberg of my Sorcery, and when the end of my training came, I assumed I’d chosen my own path to tread.

Then came my armor.

I never wanted it, the Abyssal Armor. Grandpa Lich forcing me to have it only tossed it the recesses of my second mind, to be remembered only sparsely. When I recalled killing Zaraxus and Lana, for example. Or when I explained my inability to remove it to Zoop. When I met with the False Devil. The least remembered, and ironically the most important memory was the night I attuned with it, however.

Per Grandpa Lich’s words, the heirloom was powered by the Soul Drive. A necrotic 'engine' that was currently powered by a whopping four souls. But that was beside the point. Indeed, there was one aspect of the armor that had been overlooked for years. I had my Doppelganger- a walking communications hub and my dark clone embodied in one. But so too did I have another clone, I remembered. One that I never used. Immobile though it was at first, only because of the empty reserves in the Drive, though it still could have been controlled remotely or worn by my Doppelganger. With four souls now powering its umbral flesh, however, the Abyssal Armor was autonomous. Albeit unthinking and capable of one thing only. As such...

“I have two jobs for you,” I looked to my clone, then gathered darkness into my voice and let the whispers flow. “Phantom Knight.”

It appeared from nowhere. Like umbral tendrils that reached from around my body to form into jigsaw pieces of armor flying through space, clattering as they assembled into the form of an armored devil with a skeletonized, horned head.

I pointed out and up across the room. Like many wings in the tower, the temple was a domed unit of stone that strongly resembled a sealed crater from the inside. A ring of flora surrounded the central peak, supporting a small ecosystem of insects, birds, and other small creatures while the peak itself contained the only structures in the room. A rock garden and meditation hall. The trail leading up to it was eight meters wide and riddled with obstacles found in monasteries existing on the outside, both at the time of my death and in the ancient past. This was our temple. A second home for the four of us Monks. A place where no magic or mana molding was permitted- from us.

“Take me to the brink.”

My clone and the Phantom’s unthinking, faceless helm traced the sand trail winding from the door around the base of the spire to spiral up the eighty meters to its peak as if it were making calculations for the task at hand.

Of that, I doubted. The path was to be traversed at least once a day- or any time we wished to meditate. Only when we reached the top did our two hours of reflection begin. Naturally, I was no exception. On the contrary, being the leader meant I had to make things harder on myself. So I cast a small domain to increase my apparent gravity to slightly above Earth-normal and reaffirmed my intentions with my clone just to be sure.

“Make sure he keeps pace.” I snorted. “I don’t want to be dying on the start line.”

---

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It went without saying, but the path was grueling. Hours passed before I arrived at the summit, beaten and bloodied to find Peter and the others long gone. It was just me and nature, though I hardly noticed either. Even as the animals scurried and fluttered among the rocks and trees, even as I scuttled across the rocks, I heard naught but an ethereal silence. Felt naught at all.

With a guttural sigh escaping my tattered lungs, I let gravity take me and felt… something eject from my head as my ass slammed into the ground. It wasn't pain. Perhaps... it was my consciousness, I thought; until that thought faded too.

It was all so peaceful after that. So quiet. Soundless. Dark.

For the first time in perhaps ever, I felt entirely nothing but a detached sense of perception. It was a more ethereal feeling than lying in a deprivation tank by an order of magnitude, at least, for I felt what it was to feel but not feel; to see but not see; to hear and smell and taste and also experience nothing, both never and forever in the span of a few lifetimes; or seconds. To think of nothing and to simultaneously focus one’s entirety on the ethereal fire burning so strongly in my memory, distant though it was.

Ki.

Scorching and gelid. Chaotic and tempered. Volatile and stable.

Ki.

I felt for it. Both within me and in the things around me. In the birds and the bees and the worms and the trees. I reached for it. Grasped at it. Felt it, ever so slightly, emanating from their cells while within me, I felt… nothing.

Or rather, everything.

I felt not the Ki Abbot Eiriol showed me, but a hauntingly cold ‘something’ from another Plane. It was present in only a few things. Here and there, and there and there. Globules of cold heat breached the unsettling clarity of that other realm, which was as it had always been. Dark and cold and empty and unchanging.

I felt it elsewhere also. But not in myself. I felt as I always had when standing on the edge. I felt the cold emptiness of the Under all around me. Unending. Unyielding. Everything was the same. Everything, and yet nothing. For the nothing that had been everything was changing into... something. Something that wasn't dangerous, I at least knew. It gave me no sense of urgency. It produced no craving for violence. It yielded no suffering. There was only the detached sense of perception that was me. That, and that something- that... door.

I was in the Under, where there was no such thing as death, for everything here had already died. But still, I was on the Mortal Plane, where death reigned with an adamantine fist. I was here, in the physical, but so too was I standing in the everywhere that was nowhere; staring at the ethereal fire trickling from the door that had been forced ajar by my arrival to this strange place.

Ki.

How brightly it burned from beyond that door. Such searing cold in contrast to that scalding flame I was shown.

I could feel it. But not within myself. More importantly, however, I could see it.

I could see it. More importantly, I could see that if I were to walk this path, I would have to harmonize with both the energy Abbot Eiriol showed me and whatever the ‘something’ was that lay beyond that door. Death’s Door.

No matter how long it took, I would grasp onto this Ki and make it my own. That, I promised myself.

Long before I came there, that word was given. Though such things- words, they eluded me now. Thought itself did, in that place. There wasn’t even an instinct to guide me. Only something that could have been described as 'nature' told my disembodied self to sit- rest. The instinct of a dead mind, perhaps. I didn't know. Nor did I care. I only sat. Meditated. Expanded the perception that I didn’t have outward while the focus that I seemed to be without remained forward, centered on the door that was now so much farther away.

I was no longer on the porch. Nowhere near the yard or even close to the fence. I was on the opposite side of a road that was no longer a road, sitting in a park that was not a park; and yet still, it was one. Everything still was. Stuck the same as it had been but also changing always like the lands in the Shadow Realm. A realm of darkness, illuminated by little pockets of fire that turned out magnificent when my contradicting sense of perception focused on the fires of life. Fires that burned a familiar seafoam green. Radiant in color in a way that no colors had ever been before. Ethereal, as if it were composed of a million hues my eyes were unable to detect until this very moment.

Boom.

A burst here. A bang there.

Bang.

Like nukes illuminating the night with the brilliance of their destruction.

Boom.

Something died here. Something died there. No matter what died anywhere, they released the vital energies flowing through their bodies with the radiance of an antimatter annihilation. Revealing, in the greatest clarity of those endless shades of seafoam green, the world of the rock garden in which my body sat.

I saw the world around me. But only until the fire faded and waned to the abyssal smoke that forever surrounded Death’s Manor, reducing the world around me to a peerless black expanse once again; save a sparse region, a sliver of seafoam-green light that peered through the infinite veil around me.

Ki, I realized. My ki.

The Ki of a Shadow Necromancer. So distant it was, yet so potent to remain so unignorable. So close it seemed, yet so foreign that grasping hold of it was a near impossibility. Much less circulating it.

But no matter how long it took, I would master this task.

That, I promised myself.