Gerald sat, with his back to the wall, as his broken bones slowly fused together amid white-hot flames, his chest and shoulders glazing over with pristine new skin.
“Dude…” Shao Lin frowned as the damage of his strongest attack was quickly disappearing before his very eyes. “Are you immortal or what?”
Gerald looked at him and burst out laughing. [Immortal? Haha, of course not. I just have 999 lives left.] He casually stood up and patted his regenerated stomach above which the black onyx crystal was growing larger than ever before.
“Are you sure that’s normal? I’ve never before seen anyone having their core exposed like that.”
[Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s not like it’s doing me any trouble. And besides, it’s indestructible. Even your attacks couldn’t scratch it.]
Shao Li rubbed his chin and put away the bow. “Well… I guess so.”
[And look, you ruined another piece of Hydra leather.] Gerald pointed at his torn combat suit.
“Oh, fuck off! It’s your fault for being so damn hard! Why can’t you take damage like a normal person?”
Gerald just shrugged. He was focusing mostly on defense, still. If he didn’t get wounded, then he didn’t need to waste Essence on regeneration. It seemed the most logical thing to do.
Shao Lin just sighed and shook his head. The fight was exhausting, and he pushed himself to the limit multiple times already. It wasn’t enough. Gerald could already survive even his strongest attacks, and the damage he was sustaining was becoming less and less every single day.
He didn’t know what else to do. For a person to improve at such a rapid pace, it was unheard of. Even grandsons of powerful Grand Elders, born with a Spirit Stone spoon in their mouth, didn’t grow at such extreme speed.
Shao Lin was getting desperate. He was one of the best, if not the peak itself, of combat capability of his generation, yet now a Junior, decades younger than him, was on the path to overtake him in less than a year. He even doubted he could hold out until the next inauguration which was just over half a year away.
He scoured the library for techniques, Mystic Arts, Martial Arts, anything that would give him an edge, yet everything he got was a realization that he was too slow. He even resorted to taking pills, something he never thought he would do.
Seeking help in external stimulants was not something that he, a Spirit talent, would ever have to do. Not until he reached the peak of the Spirit Realm at least. And yet… Yet he found himself staring at a crimson pill in his hand. Something that would ravage his body and squeeze every bit of potential out of him, boosting his power.
It was not a forbidden medicine, nor would it harm his Cultivation or impede his growth later on, it was just really, really freaking painful. And he decided to take it despite that. If there was one thing Shao Lin wasn’t afraid of, was pain.
He locked himself in his room, activated the isolation Formations, and sat on the ground on a Cultivation mat that was connected to a strand of the Sect’s Spirit Vein. He then took out a Golden Core of a Second Layer beast with its Soul trapped inside. It was already purified, its consciousness and memories wiped to prevent any distractions or mistakes. He placed it on the ground before him and took a deep breath. Everything was ready.
Copious amounts of Qi? Check. Purified Soul Essence? Check. Pain and suffering? He looked at the crimson pill and gulped. “Check. Fuck!” Without a second thought, he threw it into his mouth, bit it once, and swallowed the medicine.
Immediately after he closed his eyes and regulated his breathing as the pill began doing its thing. A fire started to spread from his stomach outward, and a weight began pressing on his chest. He felt bloated, yet like getting squeezed at the same time. The searing pain reached his Soul as it was violently compressed as if the weight of the entire world crashed on his shoulder.
“AAAAAAH!” Shao Lin roared in pain before he got himself back under control and grit his teeth, enduring the torture. His hand reached out and gripped the Golden Core so hard his fingers turned white.
But that was just the start. The hard part was only just beginning.
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For nearly two weeks Gerald was left alone as Shao Lin went into closed-door Cultivation to break through to the Third Layer of the Golden Core Realm.
He took that time as an opportunity to train his new skill, the space-breaking Dimensional Rift technique. As Elder Li said, it was a crude technique with little to no charm, but it served him well for the task required.
While simple, the space-tearing capability of the technique was expensive. While it started small and required little energy to tear open a tiny piece of space, the cost went up exponentially as the size increased. It was impossible to cover a large area with it, making it a tool only for those that knew exactly where to look.
Even knowing the approximate area was not enough as he would most likely have to try and punch through the veil of reality dozens if not hundreds of times. Not to mention it was in the BS Sect’s territory and such probing could be detected from far away.
The harsh gravitational ripples could be detected from the other side of the world if you knew what to look for, not to mention the loud thunderclap when the space closed itself. He had to be perfect when searching for his belongings, or he would be swarmed by the enemy in no time. Especially after the relations between the two Sects soured in recent weeks and months.
He sat on the ground in the arena in a lotus position, with a nearly ruined storage pouch in his hands. It was one of those he stole from the Golden Core Cultivators from the Brilliant Sword Sect. He already took all the valuable items from it and transferred them to his other pouches. Those guys were quite poor for being in the Golden Core, having only 13 Spirit Stones in total. They also had a few hundred Spirit Stone Shards, but Gerald didn’t even bother counting those and just tossed them among the rest.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
The true wealth of those guys lay in the form of swords. Four nice Spirit Swords, even if they weren’t the best quality, were together worth at least 100 Spirit Stones. He didn’t get them appraised since it would attract unwanted attention and he really didn’t need more trouble.
Anyway, he took the ruined storage pouch that was filled with trash and prepared himself to destroy it. But first, according to what the Elder said, and what he learned later, the pouches did in fact have a fail-safe that would expel all the contents in case of severe damage. The space inside would then collapse and nothing would remain lost.
That was kind of the problem if he wanted to test if the space-tearing technique could get him access to his ring’s lost pocket of space.
Luckily disabling the safety wasn’t too hard, and so after messing with the pouch for a bit, he managed to break it just enough for it to collapse and create a small pocket in a separate dimension while remaining anchored to this one.
[Alright!] Gerald excitedly punched the air. The storage pouch completely broke, and the connection to the pocket space disappeared. Now it was up to him and his technique to find it again.
He stood up and a glowing circle formed below him on the floor. He moved his hands subconsciously and the geometrical patterns expanded, crisscrossing the circle completely, after which Runes filled the empty spaces.
The glyph was complete, and it rose into the air vertically, around the place where the pouch was destroyed. Claw-like appendages grew from it and gripped the air. The curtain of reality shimmered and was ripped apart, slowly at first, and then faster as Gerald became more confident.
An eerie black crack formed in the air in the middle of the glowing glyph, looking the same no matter which way you looked at it. It was like a glitch, something that just shouldn’t be. Like a splotch of Vantablack that hung in the air. It was completely impossible to see inside, and the weird energetic vibrations at the edges didn’t help to diminish the creepiness of it all.
Gerald steeled his heart and reached inside with his finger. It felt nothing out of the ordinary, and similarly, he was completely fine and could pull out at any time.
[Alright, here goes nothing…] He reached inside with his left hand, plunging it in nearly to the shoulder, and began feeling around the place. He soon felt the shredded clothes and trash he left inside the storage pouch.
He shouted in elation. [Yes! It wor-!]
The glyph exploded and the crack in the air closed at light speed. The resulting thunder of a spatial distortion returning to normal ruptured his eardrums and threw him across the arena in a bloody mess.
[Ugh…] Gerald slowly opened his eyes, realizing he was blind. Luckily it didn’t take long for his Fire Mending to kick in and soon he was as good as new. His sight returned to normal, his hearing came back, and he was back in shape. Well, almost.
He looked at his left arm where the space crack snapped shut. He grumbled. His hand was gone. But that was nothing his regeneration couldn’t fix, even if it would require quite a lot of Essence to completely reconstruct.
He activated the Fire Mending ability and his arm began to glow. The wounds closed, the bleeding stopped, and the arm… didn’t come back.
[Huh?] Gerald looked at the stump in surprise. It wasn’t regenerating.
[What the fuck?] He focused and the Essence moved, bunching around the wound. His hand began to glow brighter, becoming molten and taking the form of… a stump.
[What the fuck!] Gerald shouted and forced his body to morph. Muscles around his left shoulder bulged, the bones creaked, and the tendons and nerves wriggled as they glowed with the heat of the surface of the sun, yet they did not grow. They refused to.
Just as he couldn’t force his body to grow cancer or an extra pair of hands, the missing arm simply refused to come back.
[What the fuck! What the fuck! WHAT THE FUCK!]
Gerald roared. It was the second time he lost his left hand, the last time being a year ago. How could he accept such a loss when he could literally come back from the dead?! It made no sense!
He had a splitting headache from the point-blank explosion that just wouldn’t go away, and now this? Unable to even regenerate a simple arm? He was feeling like he was going insane!
The glyph collapsed as his concentration slipped for just a moment when he, in his happiness, celebrated early. It was 100% his fault for the mess he was in. He realized that and calmed down, even if he wanted to rage and curse out loud.
Figuring the headache didn’t make much sense as his body was in perfect, well, nearly perfect shape, he checked on his Soul. Imagine his surprise when he saw it. It was in perfect shape, well almost. It was just missing one tiny thing. His left hand.
It was exactly the same as his body, cut off just below the shoulder, cleanly, like with a surgical guillotine. And the pain originated from there. And it was getting worse.
[What…] Gerald was so confused. His Soul got damaged too? That was impossible. Even when his body was completely destroyed, his Soul remained mostly fine, even when the destruction came from a Spirit Realm creature.
Unless…
He quickly came back to where he first triggered the Dimensional Rift and did it again. The glyph once again formed and rose into the air, only this time it remained parallel and low to the ground, before tearing space apart.
The black hole formed once more, and out poured a pile of trash, as well as his missing hand. He opened the space pocket on the bottom and used gravity to empty it. He was never again putting his body in there.
With a bit of Telekinetic control, he pulled everything away from the rift in space and then carefully closed it back. There was still a boom as it closed completely, but it was much less than if just left to close on its own.
[So much bullshit…] Gerald kicked away the pile of trash and picked up his missing hand. It was perfectly preserved and the cut was precise, as if made with the sharpest knife in the world. It was a bit bloody, but he didn’t care.
He put it back to the stump as it glowed and… it failed to reconnect.
[Are you fucking kidding me?!]
He sank his mind inside and saw his Soul as well as his missing hand, floating in the Sea of Consciousness beside each other. Only his Soul hand showed signs of damage and decay. Where the cut was, the damage was already showing, almost as if it was dying.
He realized what he was seeing. His Soul split into two, and despite the damage not being lethal, the smaller part was beginning to fall apart. He was still only Nascent Soul, so he didn’t have much time to save it.
He quickly sat in a lotus position and began to meditate. Entering a state of Cultivation, he began producing Soul Essence from his Qi, and used it to reconnect the two parts together. Slowly, over many hours, Gerald used the Soul Essence to feed and sew his hand back on, and when it finally reconnected completely, the natural regeneration took over and merged the two.
He opened his eyes and breathed a deep sigh of relief. He could feel his hand again, even if it still wasn’t there.
He looked at his left arm, laying on the ground. It was time.
He took it, stuck it on the stump, and with just a bit of Fire Mending, felt it spring back to life. Qi flooded the dying cells and revitalized them and awakened all those that were already dead. He felt the power course through his veins and the feeling rushed back as his arm returned to normal.
A short glow repaired all the damage and he was as good as new. For real this time.
He then collapsed on the ground, the mental exhaustion too much for him to bear. What just happened scared him more than anything else.
He lost the ability to regenerate! And the spatial blade chopped off a piece of his Soul like it was nothing! What could be more scary than that? What if he accidentally got stuck inside the tiny pocket of space? Would he instantly die? Or would he forever remain frozen in stasis as the river of time didn’t flow inside it?
What could be more terrifying than that?