He sailed across the sky on Tarquin’s back, following to where the nearest of the pillars had arisen. As they landed, the woods were full of life. Confused, blinking life - a giant, bipedal bird with clawed feet and a fearsome reptilian muzzle tried to snarl at them, until Nic unleashed his aura and sent every living thing scattering for cover.

Clearly, the Second Wave had seeded new monsters as well as natural treasures. Nic would have to do the work of driving the most pestilent of them out. He preferred recruitment to violence, but when it came down to brass tacks, he didn’t want Winterhome competing with a bunch of freeloaders in their territory to gather the new wealth of herbs and natural treasures.

Already, there were unripe fruits growing from golden vines that threaded across the trees. Rich herbal smells from sprouts that wound their way up from between the roots.

Nic and his crew had picked the area over before, and slain its most pernicious species, the Lumenarch flowers that had poisoned and addicted anyone who’d eaten them. Now the luminous quality of the forest was gone, leaving a mulchy, darkened silence beneath the canopy.

And in that silence the Monument was a glowing beacon.

It was a pyramid-shaped temple carved into a set of descending steps, a ziggurat. It leaned crookedly out of the earth. A glowing fragment of crystal stood at its peak. Two rough, curved horns of blue gemstone arose, encircling a floating sphere of perfectly smooth, rounded blue on which drifted numerous System-made runes in the color of the clouds.

As Nic brushed away the creatures with the potency of his poisonous aura, they were left alone to climb the steps, and Nic laid his hand on the crystal core.

A voice spoke.

This Monument’s Name is the Soul Cloister

It is a beacon type array, calling out to evil spirits and lingering ghosts that haunt this world. As they are drawn to the array, you must purify them with violence, dispersing their remnant will so the crystal can absorb them. With each one absorbed, the rewards will grow richer.

But beware. If any ghost shatters the crystal, the Trial will fail and the ghost, not you, will be empowered.

This Trial will last for ten minutes.

Slowly, the light of the crystal began to spread outwards, flaring to cover the temple steps and rise above the canopy. Him and Tarquin both stepped back, drawing their weapons.

Nic had Peacemaker.

Tarquin had chosen the sickle from the locust-demon’s treasure. In his other hand he carried the harpoon.

As seconds trickled by, a mist began to pour up the temple’s steps. It was a thick, congealed shadow of white vapor, in which spirits swirled and clawed at the earth, trying to keep from being pulled into the crystal core. It was no use. The crystal slurped them up, drinking deep of all the suffering, all the death, that the Earth had experienced.

And then the real spirits arrived. The first one appeared with a shriek, a cry of anger so powerful the air trembled. It was a thing made of black water like ink, with long greasy hair and clawed hands, dressed in a loose apron stained with blood.

The spirit’s wild hair flowed through the sky as it lunged at them.

Nic stepped back, and gestured to Tarquin.

Tarquin stepped forward, opened his mouth, and spat flame across the spirit. It was the green-gold shade of dragonfire and it was merciless. The air withered and bent out of shape with the fury of that contained beam, and the spirit was scattered, dissolving and reforming with a little less substance than before.

With a forward step Tarquin flung the harpoon.

The ghost sidestepped, but as it did, the harpoon suddenly teleported. It shimmered in the air and vanished to reappear directly in front of the ghost again.

With a soft sound its chest was pierced through.

Tarquin sprayed the steps down with flame once more, carving a wide sweep with a blazing brush. Runes spread outwards from the harpoon, binding the spirit so it couldn’t escape.

It was wiped from the earth, fragments of its scattered Essence flying through the air towards the crystal.

Tarquin turned back, a smile on his face-

But Nic was busy. He was engaged in furious, lightning-fast combat with a ghoulish creature with long forearms that turned into blades of serrated bones. Its empty eyes glowed like hollow lanterns, and its teeth were long, overdeveloped, unable to fit in its mouth and forcing its drooling jaws apart.

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They traded one blow after another, evenly matched in speed. Perhaps Nic was even a little behind-

But with each movement Nic was conjuring illusions, and now dozens of false spear-thrusts joined the movements of the real Peacemaker. His glaive swept down, and the ghoul parried an illusion instead.

With one swift, hacking blow, Nic ripped its head from its shoulders. Not trusting that to be lethal, he hacked down into its ribcage and tore it apart down to the bone.

As fragments of misty spirit poured from the body out into the crystal, he unleashed the Antaras runes. The chain of burning Aleph-marks moved through the air like a serpent, coiling around the body of the dead ghoul, consuming it. The pale, gray flesh burned and broke broke apart and became sparks that were pulled up into his body.

It was ‘only’ a few hundred Essence, from an E-Class opponent.

But that multiplied by dozens would double his growth every day.

As that enemy fell, new ones appeared. A shrieking red specter of a disembodied head shot through the trees, and Tarquin barely managed to fling himself to the ground in time. It slammed into Nic as he turned and caught it with one hand, thrusting his fingers into its mouth.

It was a maneuver that cost him the fingers on his left hand, but gave him time to spit a wave of Primordial Mist across the beast, melting the flesh from its skull and dispersing the spirit.

Even then…

More.

The ground was shifting, and up came dark, rotten flesh, morbidly fat with putrefying bile. The stink of them made both of the pair gag in horror, and the swollen undead lurched towards them hungrily. Nic swatted the head off one and kicked its body back, the soft skin rupturing and letting maggots spill across the steps as it bounced down them.

“Oh, Tomb…” Tarquin cursed, backpedaling. “Come with me, Tarquin, let’s have an adventure, Tarquin, it’ll be fun, Tarquin…” He made a disgusted face as Nic sliced another undead apart, blood and worse spraying from the wound in a foul mixture that coated his hands.

“This was your idea, actually.” Nic said, still struggling not to gag. The smell of the dead was so bad his eyes were watering. “I should be blaming you.”

“Just step back and cover your face.” Tarquin groaned. “They’re gonna smell worse when I flame ‘em.” Already, the fire was building in his hands, compressed down into a pair of blazing stars.

As Nic backpedaled out the way, he thrust his hands forward and let the stars explode into twin blazing beams. In a searing moment the stumbling horde was burnt down to cinders, melting against their bones, which in turn were charred down to shadows of ash.

And even then…

A whistle pierced through the trees.

More were coming.

---

For ten solid minutes, Nic and Tarquin fought back to back, slaying all comers. It was brutal, bloody work. Maggoty, putrid work. They were drenched in black gore by the end of those ten minutes, and Nic’s blade had cut through more flesh than he could remember, leaving a trail of bodies ripped open across the steps. His Antares runes worked furiously to consume- to devour- to feed his burning appetite for power as he carved his way through.

The hardest opponents were a pair that came at once, coordinating their assault. One was a tall, drowned creature with a fishlike face and sodden wet hair that restricted the air around it, preventing them from breathing; it was accompanied by a silver-haired, shriveled creature with a face that morphed wildly between old and young, a scythe clasped in its bony fingers.

One was slow and lumbering, but only had to defend itself while its drowning aura did the work. The other was furiously fast, covering its ally with the sweeping wide cuts of the scythe, threatening at any moment to mow them down if their need to breathe drove them to make a reckless move.

In the end Nic had to assume his Warform to destroy them both, unleashing the six-handed serpent to crush them with a sudden flurry of blows. The old-young scythegrinder was torn to pieces, and the slow, ungainly drowner was not long behind. Both managed to rake him over with deep wounds before they went-

Leaving Nic to collapse back down into his abyssal fisher form, letting Tarquin cover him as his wounds regrew.

By now the mist that surrounded them was deep enough to drown in. Slithering tendrils poured past into the crystal, carrying the shapes of the lingering dead.

And then, with a sudden ringing note, the crystal was full. The sound chimed through the air and repelled the mist, scattering it back.

No more undead arose.

With a splintering crack, the crystal broke apart and sent a thin beam of light sailing high into the air. The two halves of the crystal became two balls of light, one of which floated towards Nic, the other towards Tarquin…

He reached out and touched it.

Congratulations

A Trial defeated, a step taken towards the stars.

Your portion of the rewards is 20,000 Essence.

This Trial can be taken again in seven days.

He turned towards Tarquin, asking numbly… “How much?”

“Ten thousand.” Tarquin admitted breathlessly. “Ten thousand.”

They were gore-drenched and sweaty and wounded, but the reward was too sweet not to burst out laughing, leaning back on the steps and looking at their hands to see the faint System-marks fading away on their palms.

Twenty thousand.

That was a full day’s bounty for him, outside the Essence-rich environment of the Dungeon. And if they could be plundered every seven days, then securing seven Trials to run would effectively double his daily Essence growth.

He snapped open his cultivation map. With just over 25,000, he decided to split it in two and advance both his Gift of Life and his Mistwater Step by a tier, putting them both at the fourth rank. Simply being able to do that - to advance in a single step - felt intoxicatingly good.

“C’mon…” Tarquin said, staggering to his feet. “I’ve got another one in me…”

Nic just laughed. Tarquin was dirty, exhausted, and bruised. He clearly did not have another Trial in him…

But in that moment, his danger sense stirred, and he froze. Something was moving among the trees. A dark shadow drifted forward, filling the air with ash.

And that ash took on a familiar form.