This was all… wrong.

To begin with, Cavarix had been delighted at her new plaything. It wasn’t much, just a single burning light of life which she plucked the petals from. She had shorn away the human’s psyche, or so she thought. With casual bursts of power and intent from the Dao of Rot, Cavarix melted the resistances and challenges which the human boy mounted until there was nothing left. Nothing but his core. While strangling the boy’s soul, she climbed into his body through the avenue his power had left.

She wanted to laugh. The boy had used Drain, a draconic skill. Foolish. It allowed her direct entry into his pathways. From there, she just had to burn away the child. However, Cavarix found the boy’s core was a strangely impenetrable thing. With a start, she realised that she recognised this Dao. It wasn’t her’s, but it was of her kind. The Dao of the Dragon rode with this child? Not simply a stolen skill but a claimant of the Dao proper?

She tried to drill into the Dao after the boy’s personality was all but destroyed but it was no use. The Dao fought back, which suggested the child was not as simple as her first estimate had shown. Not impossible, but it suggested he was at a higher level of Dao than a simple pool. While he clearly only had two facets, they weren’t weak like she had expected. Grade Two Dao in a Grade One body?

Cavarix remembered her own Dao journey. First she had discovered the Dao of Pain which had carried her from an Ungraded whelp to her first title, The Drake of Pain. The transformation to a Grade Two Dao such as an Avatar, a Font, or Tree is usually enough to push someone at level 79 to level 80 and start their new journey to Grade Three. Like countless others, Cavarix waited until the bottleneck to evolve her Dao once more. Vast power flows from The Tree into a Dao transformation and almost all of it is wasted, so shunting some into the level up is common.

How powerful might you be if your body became used to those things earlier, though? Inside his soul in the way that she was, she couldn’t examine details yet. Once the boy’s psyche was truly turned to dust, she would have all the time in the world. With her control of Rot alongside the dominance of the Dragon, Cavarix increased the rate at which the boy would fade away while creating a barrier between him and his Dao to keep him from reaching out. For a few moments, it seemed like it was going to work.

Except, to her mounting horror, everything she tried to destroy the human’s soul was null. Her attempts seemed to slip off an orb of pure gold. Tiny holes in her technique began to allow his Dao to seep through to his soul. Cavarix did not flail like a child, but she was becoming increasingly frantic. While she had ignored the itching, screaming fear in the back of her own mind, she was starting to truly worry now. After all, it had not been Cavarix who initiated this connection, she had simply jumped along it when the boy got too cocky.

Or so she thought.

Had he trapped her on purpose?

Try as she might to smother him, like a balloon in her hands, the soul grew in size twice over, and then the same again until there was no holding him down anymore. With more disdain than the boy perhaps deserved, Cavarix roared an expletive filled scream in her base tongue. While he was human, and thus pathetic, everything about the man’s Dao was reminiscent of a nostalgia Cavarix would sooner forget. Unbidden, comparisons between Grant and The Storm Dragon began to shoot through Cavarix’s doubt-filled mind.

With a pop, the illusion she had painstakingly crafted shattered. All of the pain and suffering Cavarix had inflicted were real in a sense, and Grant’s bloodied form even in this soulspace was heartening. In this metaphysical space, such an appearance suggested that it had not been for naught, even if it felt like it. The powerful humanoid looked at her with an expression of pure impassive disdain and she shot forward.

Every instinct screamed that this was her last chance.

———————

The arena I found myself in was familiar, and I couldn’t figure out why for a moment. An errant thought that things should be louder brought the finishing touch and I realised that the Rot Dragon and I were squaring off within a larger version of the training grounds in Ascentown. It could have been any colosseum throughout the history of the System but I smiled as the voices found me. There were no individual voices in the faceless crowd, but I knew their sounds regardless. These were my people.

Well, I couldn’t disappoint, then.

Except there was something missing with my form and I took a moment to inspect it. Metaphysics was becoming nearly as understood as actual physics, in that I was beginning to be able to do things and expect outcomes. With a flick of attention, I removed my perception from inside of my somatic form and took a look at myself. In an imagined world such as this, expectations informed reality, so I wasn’t surprised when I saw my human form.

My hair was red, like someone had frozen blood to my scalp, which was naturally for me at least. In a moment of supreme surreality, I met my own eyes, and both the spirit form and physical nodded to each other. The vertical split of my heterochromia was no longer anchored, spinning slowly and causing the blue and brown colours to rotate. The effect was as mystical as I had ever seen, and I flared the Stormborn markings to life to complete the look. There was a magical resplendence to my appearance that I couldn’t help but enjoy.

My muscles were full, though not bloated like a weightlifter. It was the solid, powerful and understated brawn of a farm worker or the like. Nothing was crafted for vanity, which in turn made it all look more sculpted when the finished product was inarguably marblesque. I doubted an old world chisel could even break my skin in the real world anymore. Thinking of the world outside this space brought me out of my admiration and back on point.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

Something was off. My human self was fine, if maybe a little more handsome than I actually was. That wasn’t the issue. I looked beyond the first layer of my identity, seeing past the skin and bone to the magic underneath. Feeling like a mechanic opening the hood of an expensive car, I carefully pushed through the firmament. As I expected, the inner weavings, the connections and intricate patterns which made up my mana channels, were more complex than a mortal mind could follow.

Luckily, I wasn’t constrained by a mortal mind. Cavarix had started a charge across the arena, but I wasn’t ready to meet her in combat so I made the arena bigger instead. In an instant the space between us exploded in size, the Rot Dragon becoming nothing but an ant in my vision. I felt her fight against the effect, but this was my realm. If she wanted to fight, she would have to start moving. “You made a mistake coming here, you dirty, old snake.”

Returning to the mesh of magic, I tilted my head slightly and squinted. While I could sort of feel these pathways, getting a detailed look in this way was immensely valuable. Due to the exact concoction of things which brought me here, I wasn’t sure I could enter this state again, so I was going to get my value from the situation. There were three clear systems within my mana channels, and I sent a bundle of mana through them to clarify what I was seeing.

Starting from the core, presented as a dense sphere of threads, like the most horrifying set of tangled cables one might ever see. Here though, each tangle was a connection that helped inform the magic’s intent, like a synapse in the brain creating pathways for thought. The core was the brain of this nervous system, and from it the mana could choose a direction. All things equal, I chose an arbitrary path and followed it. I hadn’t chosen it, but once the magic began to move, I felt the skill it was tracing activate gently.

Infusion was a good choice, and the warm power which came with it was an added bonus. Even here, the effects could be felt. Normally the skill was used in a fairly brutish way by myself, just enhancing my Fortitude and Speed attributes clumsily. Right now, it was the boost to Will which helped me, no doubt. Not losing attention, I watched as the Infusion mana came into contact with the first of my Aspects.

Like my core, there were two smaller tangles of mana veins. I didn’t need nearly two thousand in Mental stats to figure out their purpose but I watched all the same. When I used Infusion, I simply flooded the body with more mana than the muscles could drain at once. I had never thought to direct the power through the focusing lens of my Aspects before, I hadn’t needed to. The Infusion danced through the two satellites of power which orbited my core and I took note of how it changed the skill’s output.

As long as I survived the fight.

My magic was fine, my body was good, so the disconnect I was feeling was even deeper than those. My instincts upon coming to this place had been to “fix” my Dao in some way, starting with truly voicing how I thought it worked. As I understood it, being perfectly correct about its intricacies or best practices was less technically important to the working of the strange magic than assuredness that you were using it right. I intentionally avoided picking that logic apart, lest I lose my ability to manipulate the Dao altogether.

Essentially, if you felt like you were doing it right, you probably were.

So, the fact I knew something was wrong meant it was. I may even have caused the issue myself but I had to stop there because theoretical metaphysics was a step too far even for my stats. Unsure if I was creating Shroedinger’s Dao, both powerful and weak at the same time, I moved my perception to an even more familiar set of sights. The worlds of my inner solar system were gleaming wonderfully.

The large planet of the Dragon thrived with life, and the moon of the tempest above exerted its influence on the world below. Storms that churned the ground and challenged the strength of life upon it. The sturdy trees and fast-recovering fields of the Dragon world were constantly remade stronger for the struggle Tempest forced upon them. The two were in a form of equilibrium, I supposed.

That was the problem, though. I could tell as soon as I saw the solar system of my magic from afar for the first time that it was flat in a way which slowed me down. The sun which sat in the sky was cold, the now-dead The Hurricane Heart serving as a facsimile for the celestial body. When I absorbed the incredible magic of the artefact, it had been the most grand source of strength I could imagine.

Now it was wan, and I knew why. Most of its strength had gone into transforming a common Aspect of Water into the legendary Aspect it became, and the rest fueled my own strength to a point. It was hard to say when the potent magic had become so spent, but that was the issue. More directly, it was a symptom of the greater problem. I had too much control over how things worked here.

“Because I don’t trust the magic.” Beautiful, alluring and miraculous. Historically, when something is described in only positives, there’s a danger hidden which others simply hadn’t seen. I recognised the thought as cynical, but I had yet to be proven wrong on it either. However, my soul space was informed by the beliefs and understandings which I held. Which meant that anything wrong here was my fault.

Not that I thought there was something wrong with me, nor that I was entirely wrong, but the blanket statement of doubt meant there was no growth to be had. I needed to stop being so stubborn. I may have received my start in the System from a troubling source whose motives were still unclear, but so what? There were forces acting against me, even within my inner world, but if they reared their head, I would lop it off. That was all there was to do.

Perhaps sensing my vague attention in its direction, the metal trees which had begun to sprout upon my inner world began to shiver. Yes, I thought, I hope your metal ears are burning. I’m talking about you. Steel was still an unwelcome addition to my soul, but one I would have to accept. The saying “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” was getting a lot of use in accepting the monster’s place as the supposed last line of defence for Ascentown.

I gently saved the wildflowers and other fae influences Naea’s presence had placed onto my world as I collapsed the model. There was a dark emptiness inside of my chest as I did so, a dangerous feeling that if I didn’t replace the Dao system with something else quickly, I would break something permanent. It was an intimidating feeling, but not one that held purchase for long. I didn’t have much to do in this process, after all.

It was as simple as flicking on a switch. “Let there be…” I murmured, as I cast forth the infinitely compacted combination of everything which I had learned so far. All of my understanding of Dao, the System, magic, life, relationships, chemistry, history, language… Everything which I believed to be true, expected to be false or held a vague guess towards came together into a tiny ball.

A single particle. With a flick, I caused it to explode. It was a pretty large pop. A big bang, perhaps. I was shunted from the space back into the arena, and I jumped backwards quickly. A huge, clawed hand, balled into a fist, smashed down on my previous location and I whistled loudly. “Close one,” I breathed, feeling the cold sweat come to my neck. Any more time messing around inside and I would have been smashed to pieces, whether I was ready or not.

“What have you done?!” The Dragon didn’t sound scared, which would have made sense, but instead she seemed furious. “Each binding to the cursed Tree is a shackle you fool.” Of course, I didn’t have the faintest idea what she was talking about but I didn’t bother asking either. The mostly bone tail whipped at me with blinding speed and I barely evaded the attack. The magic inside of me was still settling, and it seemed that Cavarix had sensed this and tried to capitalise.

I continued to dodge, desperately trying to keep my life as a new cosmos of power continued to form within the core of my magic.