FENG SAI, Running For His Life
Glancing backward had been a terrible mistake.
I instantly understood why the bird hadn’t remembered any of the details around the path to the exit — each stride the Titan took tore the world to pieces, sand and rubble exploding at it’s feet. It didn’t remember anything because there was nothing left. Buildings tore like paper in its monstrous wake.
“Why didn’t you warn me!” I yelled at the little bird. It chirped back at me angrily. The bird was diving under half collapsed columns and shooting over structures as I climbed them or slid with it, now scrambling out of the ruins as fast as I could.
The bird memory had flown away almost instantly, leaving me far behind.
Little bird chirped something at me. I felt more than saw that the little bird was doing something — the qi around it shifted as it chirped angrily. It was trying to tell me something. Trying and failing. I threw my full Willpower into my Perception again, using [Identify.]
[New Skill: Danger Sense(Perception +1, Intelligence +1)]
[Danger Sense: Years of constant fighting and evading predators has taught you to wield your perception with carefully shaped intent. Chance to alert user of incoming attacks based on Perception.]
I was holding my perception like a tangible thing, like another form of energy foreign to my body, like qi. My Willpower was double as strong as it had been only a month ago before I inherited the legacy, and I had trained it all my life to reach that threshhold. My grip over my power power was steel.
My perception was ripped out of my control. I saw a hazy image, a flash of the world behind me, the dungeon chamber blurring into mud and visual paste, a half remembered facsimile imprinted on the world.
The golem Titan’s singular red eye glowed brighter and brighter, its light dying the world crimson.
I didn’t know what it meant, but I felt my perception scream, an extension of myself burning with one singular concept: Danger.
I cycled the Anti-Light Movement technique, moving forward two steps in one, then four.
Heat erupted along my back; not hitting me, but as if I was an inch from a fire. Burning hot sand stuck to my legs and back as dust blew up around me from the ground. My next step carried me farther away. Then I stopped as I hit the wall, turning back.
[Health: 60%]
Smoke rose from the ground. Sand had been turned to smooth glass with a single pass of its massive light. The air warped and bent around the Titan’s glowing eye. With every step, it devoured the distance between us, the ruins beneath crumbling.
I wondered what was left of these ruins today if this damage had been wrought decades ago.
The bird chirped at me, startling me into motion, and I continued running, cycling the technique whenever I had an open stretch to race to the end of the ruins. Beams of horrible light arced out from the golem, melting the stone to slag and turning sand to glass.
I stopped dead.
“Wait.” I said, looking back and forth at where the buildings had been cut clean through by the broken defensive formation surrounding this place.
Then I looked back at the Titan.
Something I thought I lost a long time ago sparked to life inside of me.
Greed.
It was good for a cultivator to be greedy. Only the greediest cultivator could take the most. And I would need it. I would need everything to fight my way through the Grim Tempest. Wen had told me as much.
The bird chirped at me in alarm. Danger sense rose in power and force until it was ringing inside me, a rising siren. I looked around.
There was a clear shot for me to use the movement technique to the side, but not directly running away from the golem.
I waited.
The golem took another step. Its legs were easily mistaken for columns large enough to hold up an entire palace.
Stone and sand and rubble pelted me. I squinted to see through the cloud of dust. The air was full of smoke and dust, sand whipped up by the monstrous stride of the golem and the horrifying power of its eye.
The little bird chirped at me, going so far as to try to pull me away. But I stared up at the Titan. It blocked out the sky, it’s body rising to where the sky turned to mud. It was a mountain closing in on me; a force of nature itself. Once its eye glowed I moved to the side instead of away from it — just in time to see a wall of black light arc out of the ground on the other side of the ruin.
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Not black light, I realized. It was an opaque barrier, almost glossy, as if it glowed around the edges like a fire. As if it burned the world itself.
It was Anti-Light, using what remained of that flickering Powerwell as fuel.
I ran.
The sand exploded around me as the Titan fired beam after beam. I hurdled over stone and kicked over sand. The lightning movement technique barely worked on the soft ground.
The golem came closer to me, moving directly into the path of the wall of Anti-Light, ruins crumbling over it as the world turned into mud around me.
The bird Titan had clearly only half seen this part of the ruin; it was all guesses and mystery, mud in the shape of rubble. The buildings turned softer, my hands slipping off of them like wet clay. My feet slipped in the half formed memory of sand.
Then the beam of Anti-Light cleaved the Titan in two.
[Warning: Dungeon Chamber Stability disrupted. Evacuate Chamber immediately.]
A crack spread across the sky as the entire world fell into frozen silence.
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DALE, A Pragmatic Opportunist
Rain stung Dale’s face as he screamed, lifting his dagger up and driving it down repeatedly into the back of the [Titan Memory] he straddled. His legs were all that held him to the bird, pincered around it. Eventually, his screams began to turn to laughter as the bird plummeted out of the sky with a screech.
Dale grunted, exercising his mana to forge the shadows into a shape, crafting a gigantic glider that stretched out of his back. The flashes of lightning ate away at the dark form as he kicked off the bird and glided down to the ground.
The Titan memory hit the earth with a wet noise, crumpling into a pile of dead meat as Dale hovered to the ground. The exit door ripped up out of the bird.
Meat was on the other side of the field they were in in its full terrible form. A series of wet slopping and crunches filled the area, louder than the rain. In its expanded form, it was almost a dozen feet tall. Blood covered a malformed face that opened into a circle of irregular, serrated teeth jutting out of inhuman flesh.
Blood poured in rivulets from the hole where its face should have been, faster than the rain could wash it away. Meat’s armor had expanded around its body, splitting up into segmented pieces, an insectoid shell of stolen metal.
[Meat, Level 49 Gore Mimic]
“Get ready to go. This has to be the path this time.” Dale said, staring at the Teeth in Meat's massive, gaping maw. The teeth locked together in the shape of a human skull as the rest of its flesh warped around it, struggling to compress into corded ropes of refined muscle. Eyes and a nose and ears took shape without removing the blood. Its pseudo-face was entirely free of hair, staring with a blank expression back at Dale.
Dale grimaced as Meat replicated Dale’s face down to the last feature, save for the hair. Then an arm of flesh brought the helmet down over its head.
“Not my face. We talked about this.” Dale said with a grimace. “You’ve seen at least a dozen you can take today. Come on.”
Dale winced again as Meat’s face rearranged itself. It looked like a dozen worms squirming beneath featureless flesh as the eyes melted away before reforming.
[Sai Feng, Level 49 Warrior]
Dale smiled at the face.
“Now there we are. Come on, let’s go.”
Dale stepped through the exit of the chamber. Meat followed behind.
Instead of a new dungeon chamber, he found himself standing in a broken dungeon room — nothing unfamiliar to him. He had lurked in rooms like this before, picking off stragglers on their way out of the dungeon. As the dungeon’s last vestiges of power were transferred to the myriad Trailblazers who plundered it, the dungeon would begin to shutdown, and stragglers, weak and exhausted, would find themselves here.
It was the perfect time to pick them off.
The endless expanse of black on one side of the room was new. He winced as he looked at it.
When he heard an unfamiliar voice ask a question behind him, he reached for his weapon, expecting someone else to be lurking in the vestiges of the dungeon collapse.
“Who are you?”
Meat replied before Dale could.
“My name is — ”
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FENG SAI, Now
Qi is not power. It didn’t make you stronger on its own any more than fire made blades sharper. Qi is the forge through which we redesign ourself; we align ourselves with our dao and sharpen ourselves on its crucible in body and spirit. It is the fuel for our power, a whetstone dragged along our own meridians until we became the weapon.
As I doubled over alone in the memory of a desert that was surely forgotten to time, bent low by pain for the first time in years, I wondered if levels were the same.
Visualize a spinning storm. The wind circulates and pulls inward.
I pushed the pain away, bringing my mind into a state of meditation with each breath.
[Pain Resistance reached level 2!]
I didn’t know if it was increased intelligence or increased perception, but I sensed something I never had before. The world itself ablated against me. I thought it was pressed against my skin, but it was worse. It pressed against what I was, touching both my physical and metaphysical body. My qi scorched the air.
I forced my eyes open with a dry heave, then lifted my head up, struggling against the force of the world itself.
The Titan golem was bisected in two. The world froze around it, color draining away. I watched the glowing red of its eye shift to pink and ever closer to white as color drained away. I felt it; the world itself, all that it was, drained into me. A rivulet; a river; an ocean of power.
The little bird that accompanied me staggered along the sand as if drunk. The sand beneath its feet began to turn to the mud of a half remembered chamber.
I wasn’t meant to kill the Titan.
[Warning: Dungeon Chamber Stability disrupted. Evacuate Chamber immediately.]
[Warning: Dungeon Chamber power failure.]
[You have reached level ERROR]
[Inefficient REDACTED available to establish new level]
[You have reached level 30!]
On the Bloodstone continent, qi was limited. Not everyone could be a cultivator no matter how much they desired it. The game was zero sum. If one person had that qi, no one else did. Every piece of fuel had to come from somewhere. That was why the Feng clan ripped the crystallized qi embedded into the earth itself and shipped it across the world to fuel another empire.
Flynt had said that almost every Trailblazer who crossed through a dungeon gained 10 levels. Just like drinking the qi from a spiritbeast’s core, the Titan’s power itself fueled the advancement of the Trailblazers and the existence of the dungeon. Understanding and power filled me.
I stared up into the eye of the Titan as I forced myself to my feet, clutching at my stomach. The pain lessened. The sky itself crumbled, great blue bricks dissolving to dust to reveal an expanse of black beyond it.
I saw that storm of endless black raging in the sky among a forest of white trees larger than worlds.
Then the room around me exploded.
It was the sound of a glass pane breaking to pieces.