Kal was thrown from the guidance as his mind faltered. The void around spun and his body felt wrong, not enough limbs, not enough. Kal rolled over as his stomach recoiled, if he had anything in his stomach he would have been sick but instead he dry retched while his mind slowly reorientated itself to his surroundings.
“What…The fuck… Was that?...” Kal groaned, panting after the horrendous experiences. The hairs on Kal’s neck were stuck standing as the realization that he wasn’t alone hit home. There was something else out there and it was big. Too big. Just thinking about it made him ill. It was like the sea of blood and gore but somehow larger, seeing from its perspective almost drove him mad and Kal had seen through the eyes of a god.
Kal got to his feet and scanned the utter darkness around him but found nothing but the silver sparks of soul mana flying overhead. They weren’t just flying. They were running. The thought hadn’t even crossed Kal’s mind when he had first seen them, perhaps there was more to them than just being soul mana.
How long did he have? Kal was certain that thing had just sensed him, he hadn’t seen himself but the strange sensation he had gotten when that thing did made him sure it was him. When did it sense him? Was it the moment he got here? Or just now?
“Fuck!”
It would have been better to not know.
Kal sat back down again as a realization struck him.
Lonesome Will
To fall into the space between is a death sentence. Your anomalous nature has saved you from destruction but soon you will wish it hadn’t.
Part 1: Heal your shell 4160/4160
The strong wither to dust in the space between. Will you do the same?
Part 2: Survive 21 days.15/21
..
.
Escape the place between: 0/1
Time Limit: 85 days
Rewards: Title, Two mortal lives.
That was why there was a time limit… It would arrive in eighty-five days and then he would be fucked. The original one-hundred-day time limit suddenly didn’t seem like long enough.
“Great. First I need to not starve to death and escape this fucking place before I’m devoured by some monstrosity of the void and then I have to go kill god. Fucking great…” Kal fell onto his back and used his hands as a pillow, “Gods I could use a beer right now. Even one of Dalen’s shit ones would be perfect.”
----------------------------------------
Part 2: Survive 21 days.17/21
Time Limit: 83 days
Kal’s entire body ached and he had begun to take significant attribute damage.
Attributes
Strength:
636[-165] Hunger
Agility:
342[-160] Hunger
Endurance:
623[-165] Hunger
Vitality:
256[-160] Hunger
Intellect:
561
Perception:
514
Will:
1234
Wisdom:
491
Available:
18
It had taken longer than he had expected but the damage was building up quickly. It wouldn’t be long until he was barely stronger than an unascended. At least his mental attributes were still unaffected, not that they had helped him much in the last two days. As his hunger grew worse Kal found himself feeling fatigued incredibly quickly but he forced himself to continue reading looking for anything that could help him.
In a journal called The Exploration of Monsters Unseen [Rare] Kal found a particularly interesting entry on something called a Dkarai it was some kind of incredibly rare half undead creature. It apparently had some very strange combinations of affinities and resources. It had both vital energy and something the author called negative energy. It had mana like any other human or base shell variant if Kal continued with academic term but the Dkarai’s mana affinity was always a kind of nature type.
The author mentions four affinities, nature, plant, spring, and flowers specifically but also says there are probably many more. Kal had seen nature before but the others were new to him and he was honestly surprised by how granular it got. Illgathar had mentioned that the more focused you were in your affinities the more potent your skills became but Kal questioned the wisdom of having an affinity like “flowers”.
The reason why the Dkarai was important to Kal though wasn’t its weird affinities, though that gave him hope it may be the key to his survival. No, it was that Dkarai could consume their own vital energy for food. However, where Kal was stuck was that the Dkarai performed a very specific conversion on their vital energy exactly what the author didn’t know. Which had become a theme in many of the books not specifically discussing the functions of vital, and physical energy.
Now that Kal understood that vital energy was basically infused into his blood in his heart before moving through the rest of his body he was sure there was something he could do. Somehow all Dkarai had the ability so it had to be relatively simple for them to accomplish. The author didn’t mention anything about the use of the creature's negative energy when it came to feeding itself but it did mention that it was used in many of its other common skills as a way to dampen the effects of other creatures skills.
Stolen novel; please report.
Was that part of it? Did it also use its negative energy to reduce its vital energy somehow? Possibly but that didn’t really make sense with what Kal had learned so far. Reducing it would just worsen the already terrible efficiency cycling-
Kal’s eyes widened as he got an idea. Why he hadn’t thought of it early shocked him but the idea of removing something had summoned it to his mind. As he was beginning to understand the workings of his body and amplification skills he was starting to realize there was always a give and take. With his horrible inefficient healing technique it was both very expensive and effective across his entire body because it basically just amplified the speed at which his vital energy could course through his body.
Of course, it had more downsides than that but the idea held true for most of his skills. Wrath Incarnate was incredibly expensive to the point where he could only activate it for a very brief time if he had no additional sources of wrath of enemies affected by his fear aura. The expense was like because it affected all of his stats, which now that Kal thought about it was probably terribly inefficient. The skill increased his intellect and wisdom but the urging of the skill made him ignore practically everything to do with those attributes.
So why couldn’t he just restrict where his resources went? Could he relocate the endurance that was meant for his arms and instead empower his heart and lungs?
Could he focus all of his resources on only the necessary functions of his body? It wouldn’t feed him but it could give him more time. Inspired by the idea Kal prepared himself to try it. It definitely wouldn’t be as simple as healing himself if he could call that simple but he was running out of time.
Kal stayed in just his internal view and started near his heart where the blood and mixed vital and physical energies reentered the heart before moving onto the rest of his body. He began with the containment sphere as always but quickly moved onto what he hoped would keep him alive for at least the next five days. Two imprinting constructs were weaved together with threads of will and Kal began to will what he desired into the first.
Ultimately the imprinting constructs were pretty simple, he just hoped they would act as he wanted. The first was to restrict the flow of his physical energy to only his lungs. The idea there was to simply have it cycling upon itself but not actually enhance anything so it used as little energy as possible, “Best case it worked like a treat, worst case his next breath would shatter his ribcage and spine…Moving on.”
Second was the vital energy imprinter, this had a few extra things he had to keep in mind though. One he needed vital energy to reach his brain or he would either instantly die or all of his mental attributes would basically vanish and he was pretty sure he had no chance at being able to Soul Forge with eight intellect. Two he had to cycle it relatively evenly between his heart, lungs, and brain.
Going the most simple and likely safest method Kal weaved a total of four channels in the sphere one for the physical energy and three for the vital energy. Kal added two more imprinting constructs alongside the vital energy channels so that he had one for each of the three important organs. With that precariously in place Kal only had one more construct to add.
He had never tried connecting any of his constructs directly in line with its natural flow. His healing technique injected into the bone marrow of his sternum which worked fine but he was taking the physical energy from his stamina pool not directly from his body like he was about to do with both of his resources.
He also had to actually separate the energies into the correct channels for his makeshift construct. Kal did what he hoped would pull it off by simply creating a combination of an imprinting construct and a ‘Y’ intersection channel before splitting the vital energy a second time and connecting those lines to the ones connected to the organ pointer constructs.
“Now for the scary bit…connecting it to his body. Wait, I have a construct for that.”
Kal had worried about dropping the sphere into place only to fumble with connection and dump all of his energy into a random spot but then he remembered his second core switch. Kal’s head was starting to ache with all the constructs he was maintaining without locking it in as a skill but he gritted his teeth and added a final channel.
The final channel went cleanly through the sphere and was only connected to the switch construct so that once he put it in place it shouldn’t interfere with the flow of energies. Then at any time, he could activate the switch, and the energies would move through the constructs.
“Ok, now it's time for the scary part.”
Kal found the largest tube at the top of his heart prepared to lower the sphere into place. He took one last breath and double-checked to make sure the switch was in the correct position. Then before he could find another reason to delay it he plunged the sphere into the top of his heart-
Kal’s eyes flickered open and he dragged himself back into a seated position as the platform spun around him. His heart pounded and every inch of him ached. He could barely think for several seconds before he finally started to feel normal again. Cutting off his body's resources for even an instant had almost killed him and now he was about to do it again. In a more controlled ... .Hopefully.
The sphere sat embedded in the same place he had left it and he smiled when he saw that the channel was successfully passing the mixed energy through the construct and back into its natural path, “Let’s just hope the next part doesn’t kill me…”
Not wasting any more time Kal entered the sphere and activated the switch. The change was instantaneous and Kal fell to the ground as every ounce of strength he had left him. Suddenly the ground was incredibly uncomfortable as it made his armor jab into his back painfully. He brought his eyes back into his body and even as he felt horribly weakened and was almost suffocating in his now incredibly heavy armor Kal laughed.
Red power surged around his brain, heart, and lungs glowing far far brighter than it ever did before. Interestingly his lungs didn’t glow with the same luster but instead, a webwork of green lines crisscrossed their way across its outer surface.
Kal opened his status and he laughed harder. Who would have thought he would be glad to see his attributes low?
Kalum Lesta
Status
Class:
Slayer of Fate [Epic] [Anomalous]
Level:
71
Race:
Human?
Health:
200/200
Stamina:
220/220
Wrath:
0
Attributes
Strength:
22[-778] Anomalous
Agility:
15[-486] Anomalous
Endurance:
22[-765] Anomalous
Vitality:
20[-395] Anomalous
Intellect:
561 -> 785
Perception:
514 -> 719
Will:
1234 -> 1727
Wisdom:
491 -> 687
Available:
18
Titles
Ascendant, Core Bane, Core Smith, Defier of Dhinir, Planeswalker, Planar Appetite, Slayer of the Strong, Endurance Elite, Strength Elite, Will Paragon, Demon Slayer, Paragon of Man, Planar Binding I, Soul Seer, True Slayer of Demonkind, Thief of Ages, Fate Diviner, Exemplar of Defiance
Skills
Soul Forge [Rare], Wrathful Regeneration [Uncommon], Wrath Incarnate [Uncommon], Abyssal Consumption [Rare], Flames of Wrath[Uncommon] [Soul Forged], Slayer’s Intent [Rare] [Soul Forged], Slayer’s Apathy [Rare] [Soul Forged], Edge of Malice [Common] [Soul Forged], Flesh of Iron [Rare], Eyes of the Slayer [Mythic] [Spiritbound]
Race
Birthright: Confined