Rev found another cell block. It frustrated him that he would have to continue exploring in the darkness, but with no other choice, he opted to press on. The first time he heard the groan of a zombie, he panicked; making it a hundred feet back the way he had come before realizing that the sound had come from his side. Due to his essence sense, he knew that that direction held a locked cell; meaning the zombie in question was safely trapped behind bars. Feeling slightly more comfortable due to this revelation, Rev returned to his explorations. He was forced to suppress another panic attack as he passed the zombie, but otherwise went unmolested. As far as he could tell, the zombie hadn’t even alerted to his presence.
He walked for what felt like hours; moving in a straight line the entire time while his surroundings remained the same. The jail cells were set at regular intervals with approximately five feet of blank stone wall between each. Occasionally he passed one which held the zombified corpse of a prisoner, but since they were firmly locked behind the thick metal bars, they couldn’t do more than wail mindlessly at him on the rare occasion they even noticed him. More rarely, he passed intersections, but never followed them as that was a good way to get hopelessly lost.
Eventually, he took a break; cultivating for an hour in an empty cell, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he generated three full units of essence in that time. One point of essence was invested into his stamina stat to stave off hunger, while he saved the other two. Feeling refreshed, he emerged from his cell, and after continuing a short distance down the hallway, encountered another zombie prisoner. This time, he paused, and tried something new. Using the two points of essence he had banked earlier, Rev decided to experiment with the purification ability. The first thing he learned was that though he could scan zombies from a distance, it required direct physical contact in order to actually perform the purification process. The second thing he learned was that not every entity had the same cost to purify. In this case, the zombie in the cage would cost ten thousand essence for a full purification, compared to the female zombie from his first encounter, which only would have needed one thousand.
Bracing himself, Rev tapped on the bar, and jumped back as the creature reacted vehemently; wailing and throwing itself against the bars. Though he couldn’t see the zombie at all, Rev used the sound to orient himself; grasping blindly until he managed to catch a flailing arm. Before the zombie could react, Rev channeled the two points of essence into purification, and was transfixed as a soft glow lit the space; dim, but also blinding after hours in the pitch black space. What transfixed him was the way the man’s body un-shriveled in a way that was sickly fascinating. Soon, instead of a zombie, he was faced with a mostly-naked asian man who appeared to be in his early twenties. Before he could make out more than this, the light of purification winked out, and he was silently grateful, as the remaining scraps of clothing had covered entirely the wrong bits.
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Purification Time Remaining: 3:00
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As he watched, the clock began to count down, confirming it meant three minutes, not three hours.
“Hello, can you understand me?” Rev asked, pushing the timer to the side of his vision.
The man babbled at him in a language Rev didn’t understand, and he sighed in frustration at the confirmation that he was unable to communicate. That was when he noticed the essence particles he was using as low-grade sonar began to suck into the man. Interestingly, the purification timer increased by an extra ten seconds, before beginning to tick downward again. Suddenly, the timer lost thirty seconds as the prisoner created a small globe of light that floated above his hand. The man babbled out another several sentences worth of dialogue before Rev interjected, “I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying.”
The man frowned, before clucking in annoyance. Rev watched as more and more essence was sucked from the surroundings. When his timer read four minutes, the man beckoned Rev toward him. Rev took a hesitant step forward. More impatient gesturing followed, and Rev chose to take a risk.
He was almost touching the bars when the man laid the palm of his free hand against Rev’s chest. There was a flash of blue light, and the purification timer dropped to two minutes.
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Law of Words boon Minor Gift of Tongues has been bestowed. For a period of time, you will understand all spoken and written words formulated in a mortal tongue.
Time remaining: 35:23
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“Can you understand now?” The man asked.
Rev nodded. “Who are you?” He asked the man, who had a slightly distant look as Rev felt more environmental essence siphoning into him to increase the timer.
“My name is Fi Trin. As you might have guessed, I am an acolyte of the Order Of The Holy Word. A better question is, who are you? I feel as if I’ve been asleep for years, and I remember… a dream. I was hungry. So hungry…” Fi stared at him with a glint of madness in his eyes. Rev took a step back, and Fi seemed to wake from his momentary remembrance to adopt a more neutral expression. “I apologize. I think… I’m still waking up.”
Rev shook his head. “It’s ok. Honestly, I have so many questions, I don’t know where to start. Do you understand the situation? Do you know what happened to the world?”
Fi thought about this for a moment before nodding. “I have some idea. I felt my essence drain. No matter how much I produced, or extracted, it just kept draining faster until eventually I became that… thing you found me as. Oh god, it’s still happening.” Fi stared at him in horror. “You need to make it stop. Let me have more essence, please, just a couple more units. I don’t want to go back to that. Not again.” Fi struggled against the bars, straining against them futilely, then draining as much essence as he could from their surroundings. It bought the man another minute on his timer, but it wasn’t long before the entire area had been picked clean of essence. Rev felt more slowly begin to migrate inward from outside of the essence void, but now Fi was struggling to add more than a second to the timer every two to three seconds. What’s worse, the efficiency seemed to be dropping, as if every second of extra life was costing increasingly larger amounts of essence.
“Please. You have to help me. I need more essence.” Fi begged.
Rev shook his head. “I’m sorry. I only have a couple points myself.”
The moment he said this, it was as if Fi could no longer see him, and within moments he could feel the suctioning force strengthen against the essence around him. It took Rev a moment to realize that Fi was actually spending more energy than the energy he earned in return as the purification timer periodically jumped downward by an extra second.
“You need to stop.” Rev pleaded. “I woke you up because I was hoping I could ask you some questions.”
Fi ignored him. Instead, the suction increased even more, and the timer drained even faster. This became a vicious cycle; the more Fi panicked, the harder he drained, and the harder he drained the faster his life ran out. Finally, the timer reached zero.
“Noooooooo not again!” Fi cried out in horror as his body began to shrivel back into its original form. Strangely, he hadn’t reabsorbed his ball of light; so once again, Rev watched in disgusted fascination as the man’s body reverted to its zombified form. As the zombie toppled forward in the momentary space between life and death, the light ball detached from its hand, and flew to a stop by Rev’s feet. It landed with a gelatinous plop, and he curiously bent over to pick it up. Naturally, he didn’t look directly at it, but instead examined it with his essence sense. As his senses roamed over it, he could see how the ropes of essence connected to each other. It was complex, but at the same time, compared to the way his essence wove through his body when he upgraded a stat, he thought it seemed crudely made.
Fi’s zombie interrupted his musings with a loud wail, and Rev retreated several cells away, hiding in a freshly locked cell to play with his new toy. He had never attempted to actively shape essence before, but now that he had an example in front of him, it was relatively simple to mimic the structure of the light ball. And yet, the simplicity of the task belied its difficulty. Essence simply didn’t want to be shaped in this way. It bucked, and batted against his control, fighting to remain inside his body. It wasn’t actually expensive, as he managed to fuel the process by pulling in environmental essence, it was merely the difficulty of the process that challenged him.
It took half an hour until he was finally done, but when he finished, the previously invisible essence construct seemed to flare into life as it began emitting a dim white light. It wasn’t as bright as the original construct that he had copied, and his essence sense showed him where small flaws existed in the weave of essence, but he didn’t care. So many options had just become open to him. The ability to create a light source, the knowledge that he could direct essence externally to create effects beyond just reinforcing his body, the fact that the construct was self-sustaining; pulling in environmental essence to sustain itself. Rev felt as if a whole new world had been opened to him. He was split between continuing to explore the physical space of the complex, and exploring the mysteries of this new power. Before he could become too lost in excitement, he was interrupted by several notifications.
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New Essence Path Established:
Minor Ball of Light
Will take in environmental essence, and convert it to physical light. Current quality level will last for up to 24 hours before instabilities will break the essence channel.
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Title Gained!
For achieving the common ranked feat of reverse-engineering an essence construct, you are awarded the title: Lesser Essence Architect
Lesser Essence Architect: gain an instinctually better understanding for the inner workings of constructs.
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Experimentally, Rev dropped his new light ball, and attempted to form another. This time, instead of the monumental struggle he had experienced before, one of his two points of essence was instantly drained into a new ball of light. He could feel how the essence flowed through a new pathway in his body; simply snapping into the correct shape to form yet another orb with little difficulty. Finally, he had realized a simple, long-held dream.
“Fuck yes, I’ve got magic!” He cried, and imagined that the answering wails of the surrounding zombies for half a mile around were the cheers of his adoring fans.