Chapter 8: The Magic That Has Awoken Within You
The ritual circle activated, the cubes rising up in a sudden vortex of wind that erupted from the ritual circle. The cubes disintegrated into sparling, glowing glitter, like they had just been Thanos-snapped. The magic within the cubes broke into smaller and smaller bits, integrating with the vortex until it became a storm of tiny sparkling rainbow lights.
The vortex reached its apex. Nara’s hair would have been wildly whipped around her head, if she had any hair. She had only now realized she was bald, and that she wasn’t normally bald.
Wait—why am I bald? She belatedly wondered.
Before she could ponder the strange detail of her body, her focus was pulled back to the wild magic surrounding her. It began to stream into her, through every single pore of her body. The magic sent tingles and shivers across her body, triggering every single nerve. Her nerves felt raw again, but not so raw as to be painful. Rather, she felt energized, like she had just been shot up with coffee so distilled it became liquid lightning and had replaced her blood as her body’s source of fuel.
As the storm abated, the ritual spent, a single, glowing cube slowly materialized before her. It was a pale blue, the light shining from it as if passing through mist. It exuded a sense of ethereality and mysticality, like light from a location where spirits would appear in a forest untouched by humans, if they existed.
“That’d be your mystic confluence.” Amara said. “Accept it.”
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Item: [Mystic Essence] (unranked, unavailable)
Classification: Confluence essence, consumable
Manifested confluence of Dimension, Harmonic, and Balance.
Requirements: Less than four absorbed essences
Effect: Imbues one awakened mystic essence ability and four unawakened mystic essence abilities.
Effect: If unabsorbed, the Mystic Essence will disappear.
-[Use Mystic Essence? Y/N]
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The cube was suspended in air, expectant and waiting. She reached forward, grasping it with two hands. It immediately melted into her palms, the light seeping into her hands setting her palms aglow.
She had felt energized before, but now she felt a sudden surge in power as her body changed. No—her existence changed.
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-You have absorbed [Dimension Essence].
-You have absorbed 1 of 4 essences. Progress to Iron Rank 25%.
-[Dimension Essence] has bonded to your [Speed] attribute, changing your [Speed] from Normal to Iron 0. Master all Dimension Essence Abilities to increase your [Speed] attribute.
-You have awakened the Dimension Essence Ability [Phase Shift]. You have awakened 1 of 5 Dimension Essence Abilities.
-You have absorbed [Harmonic Essence].
-You have absorbed 2 of 4 essences. Progress to Iron Rank 50%.
-[Harmonic Essence] has bonded to your [Power] attribute, changing your [Power] from Normal to Iron 0. Master all Harmonic Essence Abilities to increase your [Power] attribute.
-You have awakened the Harmonic Essence Ability [Astral Blessing]. You have awakened 1 of 5 Harmonic Essence Abilities.
-You have absorbed [Balance Essence].
-You have absorbed 3 of 4 essences. Progress to Iron Rank 75%.
-[Balance Essence] has bonded to your [Recovery] attribute, changing your [Recovery] from Normal to Iron 0. Master all Balance Essence Abilities to increase your [Recovery] attribute.
-You have awakened the Balance Essence Ability [Refresh]. You have awakened 1 of 5 Balance Essence Abilities.
-You have absorbed [Mystic Essence].
-You have absorbed 4 of 4 essences. Progress to Iron Rank 100%.
-[Mystic Essence] has bonded to your [Spirit] attribute, changing your [Spirit] from Normal to Iron 0. Master all Mystic essence abilities to increase your [Spirit] attribute.
-You have awakened the Mystic Essence Ability [Cosmic Path]. You have awakened 1 of 5 Mystic Essence Abilities.
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
-You have absorbed 4 of 4 essences. All of your attributes have reached Iron Rank.
-You have gained damage reduction against Normal Rank damage sources. You have gained increased resistance to Normal Rank effects.
-You have gained the ability to sense auras.
-You have gained the ability to sustain yourself using sources of concentrated magic.
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She ignored the slew of Guide messages, her mind focused in the moment. Her senses felt as if they were reborn. Her mind felt reborn. Her sense of vision felt more focused, sharper. Her sense of touch, sensitive and detailed.
Her gaze ran over her hands, and she flexed her fingers, feeling the way her joints and skin moved. She felt euphoric, and briefly wondered if any drugs on Earth brought people to this level of elation.
“I feel amazing,” She whispered, suddenly noticing the details of her own voice, pleasant and familiar. “I feel like I could run a marathon.”
Energy pumped through her body. Right now, she could do anything. Learn martial arts, clean up her rented house, develop a habit of jogging, do the splits. Mundane thoughts ran through her mind as if she was preparing a mental checklist to accomplish. Even at a euphoric high, her thoughts were still based in reality.
“You’re going to want to enter that room there,” Amara said, pointing to a door directly across from Nara. “There’s a shower in there. Use it.”
“A shower? What for—”
Suddenly, her euphoria reversed, plunged into hell like Lucifer was banished from Heaven. From the apex to the pits, from elation to nausea.
She dashed to the door, and it automatically vanished allowing her inside, then reappeared to reform.
From every pore and every orifice of her body, noxious, unpleasantly thick, oily and iridescent, black sludge sluiced from her body. She felt the sludge cling to her eyeballs and drip out of her ears, the sensation causing her to retch the same toxic sludge.
The smell was vile, the worst thing she had ever smelled in her life. A combination of rot, the worst bodily fluids, and the acridity of ammonia and gasoline stung her nose. The sludge dribbled even from there, shooting the smell into brain.
New core memory created. Nara groaned between heaves, each sending a new glob of sludge to the ground.
She forcefully crawled on the ground, through the filth, to reach what resembled a shower. There were two circular panels instead of knobs. One presumably turned on the shower, and she pressed it, not caring in the moment if it was cold or hot.
“This is the physical reality you wanted so badly,” She growled through gritted teeth.
The water that cascaded from the ceiling like a rain after a drought was miraculous. It clung to the gunk, stripping her of it like industrial grade dish soap.
Water also flushed through the rest of the room, dragging with it the black sludge down the drain, cleansing it as if it was never there in the first place.
She yanked off her white clothes, throwing them in a corner of the room to let the water wash over her and cleanse her. She tipped her head back, letting the water cleanse out her ears, eyes, mouth, and even her nostrils.
It wasn’t normal water, that much was clear. It was some sort of magical water, stripping dirt and gunk with supernatural ease. It left her with an impossibly clean sensation like she’s never experienced, and she felt entirely refreshed, at least physically.
She still felt peaky, and hyper-sensitive, as if hungover. Nara had never been hung over before, or she never remembered if she had been or not. Probably the former, she wasn’t much of a drinker.
There was a fresh change of clothes in one of the cabinets in the room, spared from the whole room purgative flush. Before she got the clothing, she noticed something strange in the full length mirror. There was a scar on her chest where her heart should be, vertically oblong and tapered. She ran her fingers over it, touching the skin. Neither felt any different, with a seamless transition from scar to normal skin.
“Was that always there?”
She looked next to her face. In the astral, she had no face. Here, she had one, to her immense relief.
The face that stared back at here was familiar yet changed. Her facial features were simple and bright. Between cute, elegant, and sexy, she was more solidly between cute and elegant, but not standout and rather plain; Needless to say she wasn’t maxing out the radar chart. She had a medium nose with a straight bridge, unusual with her half-Chinese heritage. She was mixed heritage, Chinese and European, but her features leaned more heavily towards the European side. Her older sister was the opposite, in both facial features and personality. At least that, she remembered, although her name still felt like a thought on the tip of her tongue she couldn’t quite verbalize.
She had balanced lips and brown almond eyes. She didn’t know how her eyebrows looked, since she had none. Overall, her face gave her a pleasant but ordinary feeling, with nothing memorable and nothing offensive. Whether it was her original body reconstruction or her rank up, she no longer had any scars or sun damage of any sort, besides the new one on her torso.
She rubbed her bald head. It was uncannily bald, with no hair fuzz, as polished as a cue ball. The rest of her body had no hair as well. She would have looked like a test subject of a sketchy lab, if she wore the iconic pale blue dressing gown.
The familiarity with her own face along with the new memories bubbling to the surface was a reprieve after the traumatic purgation. She didn’t know what it was… but purgation felt right. A ‘cleanse’ did not nearly communicate the vile violence of the event.
She pulled on the extra set of clothes, a similar pair of loose white pants and shirt set as the one she wore previously, which was now trashed. Just looking at it made her eyes water from freshly unpleasant memories.
She pulled them on, then exited the clean room, as she called it.
“Come over here.” Chelsea said, patting a chair set out in front of another mirror. “I’m going to sort your hair situation for you. I can’t leave you looking like some pitiful shaved cat.”
At least she didn’t say naked mole rat.
She sat down in the chair. Reflected in the mirror, Chelsea pulled a tin of cream from thin air. “This is hair growth cream,” She explained, “A common product for essence users to have on hand. You’ll lose all your hair every time you rank up. Now that I’ve told you, I better not see you bald, unless you want to be.” She pulled on a thin pair of transparent gloves, protecting her own hands from the effect of the cream.
She deftly spread the cream atop her head, then a bit along where her eyebrows should have been. After a moment, long, thick brown hair sprouted all the way down her back. The eyebrow hair grew to a normal length, to what their normal maximum length was. Her eyelashes were too sensitive of an area; they’d have to grow from scratch, 0.15 millimeters at a time. Chelsea brought out a pair of scissors, a comb, as well as some sort of tapered wand.
“The cream will only grow hair where it’s normal to grow hair,” Chelsea explained, “but the hair manipulator wand will push back any hairline that’s grown too far forward. We don’t any any unibrows, now do we?” She looked at Nara through the mirror.
“Are your eyebrows normally that faint?”
“I think so,” Nara said, running her fingers over them.
It turns out, she had one standout feature, ‘delicate’ eyebrows, as the 11th Doctor of Doctor Who would have called them. She found she didn’t mind them. They felt characteristic.
Chelsea didn’t bother asking Nara what length she preferred. She cut away, hair drifting to the ground in small bunches.
“There we go,” Chelsea said. “All done. Now you at least look presentable.”
She had cut her hair to around shoulder length. Her hair had a slight wave to it. It was a medium brown, with hints of auburn and gold that revealed themselves under strong light. No matter how she spun it, she was just an average brown eyed brunette.
Chelsea, Amara, Laius, and Redell were so beautiful it was pointless to compare herself to them. It would be like comparing the undefined features of a toddler to an adult in their prime, entirely meaningless. Laius was… a panther man. She didn’t know if he was considered handsome or not, but suspected that among his people he was.
“Shall we take a look at what magic has awoken within you?”