At first, Alistair didn’t understand why everything was in grayscale. He felt something was off from afar, and the life force of the living beings inside the Wasteland felt strange, but he couldn’t quite come up with a full explanation.
But now that he was inside, he was beginning to understand. It was Mana. The ambient Mana that suffused the entirety of the air was thinner, but not overly so. The difference was that it lacked animus. It was without the spark of vigor that gave Mana its energetic essence.
That took a visual form in the absence of color. His internal Mana leaked out in wisps of color, the only pigmentation except for the growing presence in the distance.
Alistair felt like it was Mana’s answer to a Heavenly tribulation. But this was no wrath of the Heavens, but of nature itself. A great mass of Mana of every flavor gathered on the horizon, washing the black-and-white landscape in temporary swathes of the rainbow. It reminded him of the facsimile Dao Heart, but this force of the cosmos was no pretty condensation of colorful mist.
It looked like a combination of different types of of weather phenomena. The torrential downpour of a hurricane, manifested in glowing liquid affinity Mana. Cycling, hypersonic winds of a tornado, in emerald wind affinity Mana. Firestorms, lightning, and hard-to-describe masses of death and time, Mana congealed together into an amorphous storm of unbelievable proportions.
Red lightning obliterated the ground in columns of plasma taller than the highest skyscrapers. It was a wild twin to the lightning of Heavenly tribulation, smiting the ground with not divine wrath, but the fury of the natural world. Wrathful scarlet flames emerged from the destroyed earth, searing everything in a blaze not dissimilar to the ones in the firebird Selephita’s area. Strange tiny ravens made of death aura spread with the flames, like carriers of the plague.
The Mana Storm spread over five kilometers, but it was moving towards them at a rapid pace. While the storm wasn’t actually conscious, Alistair swore he felt anger from the mass of affinities. It was directed at him and Oliver, a fury that wanted to reclaim their greedy bodies that had stolen so much of the precious aura of the cosmos.
As cultivators, they were stealing Heaven’s providence: the immortality of the body, enlightenment of the mind, and purification of the soul. It was nature’s wont to reclaim that stolen Mana. Even though the technology of the Sublimed Machine through the Final Frontier Empire had placated natural law, even they could not fully stop it.
“What are we going to do?” Oliver shouted over the blasting winds, which had picked up once the storm became visible. “It’s coming for straight for us! You can feel that right?”
Alistair nodded. If they merely tried to run it would chase them. He didn’t have to ascribe a malevolent consciousness for that—as Mana it was attracted to Mana. At its current speed, he could outrun without a hitch, but Oliver was too slow. Of course, he had a common solution for that by this point, but perhaps that wasn’t the best course of action.
“Why don’t we tame the storm?” Alistair posed. “We probably can get some goodies from this thing. The bigger they are, the more goodies they give?”
“That sounds crazy, but I’m down. As long as you promise to get me out if it gets too dangerous.”
“Promise.”
Alistair took a deep breath and looked at the Mana Storm head on. He took in every minute detail, admiring its majesty. This was what he expected of Journeyman worlds—something beyond what his mortal mind could imagine.
The flames and death Mana ravens expanded faster than the storm itself, laying waste to the land. As they reached further and further away from the heart of the Mana Storm, they slowly lost their color.
When they got close, Oliver held up a hand. And scared Alistair. For just a moment.
Alistair hadn’t had any opportunity to see Oliver in action since before the fifth Quest, [The Game of Life]. While they joined forces for a brief period against Dragonus and Admiral, that quickly devolved into two separate fights, and he had only seen the end of Oliver and Alexandra’s struggle against the naval Devil King.
For a single moment, a wave of fear washed over his body as Oliver’s Dao energy exploded out of his body. For an ephemeral moment, he doubted his own understanding of Black and White Impermanence, of himself as a psychopomp and representation of death. For that moment, he saw the finality of the death: the end.
Oliver’s Dao energy was the unsullied death that all living beings refused to countenance. The accidental death energy of the Mana Storm obeyed him absolutely, fading away to nothingness.
Alistair helped out with the flames, casting a [Frozen Claw] that froze the blaze into scarlet ice crystals. But the columns of lightning still encroached, seemingly getting faster as the storm grew nearer.
The winds were raging now. With his 266 Constitution, Alistair weighed almost a ton, so it was hard to move him. But the gales were strong enough to push him back, and Oliver, who was much lighter, had to dig his hands into the ground to stay put.
That made it impossible to communicate through normal methods. Luckily, since Oliver knew about Dev’rox, they could use the imp as an intermediary for communication. Alistair had Dev’rox tell Oliver his plan, who nodded in response.
Alistair was no stormchaser, especially not of a Mana Storm. But he had his instincts. [Fighter’s Instinct] was on the verge of advancing to Tier 5, and he had the assistance of Dev’rox’s formidable experience. He had a strong feeling that the storm would attempt to strike down power.
Alistair closed his eyes for a moment, gathering his aura. Then he let it out. Maybe there was a small part of him that wanted to one-up Oliver. Only a small part, of course.
At this point, his soulcore was entirely saturated with properly attuned Mana. His Skills no longer had any use for the ad hoc conversion sieves within his meridians that turned pure Mana into the proper affinity. Now, his soulcore had his four affinities in their full substance—force, lightning, ice, and blood.
Vibrant color temporarily coated the dull landscape. The storm stirred in the distance in response to a rival energy. Faster than seemed possible, the lightning changed angles, arcing toward Alistair like an angry swarm of bees.
Oliver was right there to defend him. As planned, he opened one of his empty [Otherworld Gates], as a square of darkness in the sky. Oliver had moved far beyond his tiny portals that could only house human-sized objects. The [Otherworld Gate] he produced blotted out almost the entire sky from Alistair’s sight.
Lightning rained down into the portal, disappearing into a pocket dimension. Oliver grimaced as it happened. Dev’rox relayed to Alistair that he could only absorb so much energy before it would burst.
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Alistair didn’t need that long. With Oliver’s Skill redirecting a decent portion of the Mana Storm’s wrath, Alistair could proceed with his crazy idea—trying to capture the storm. Lightning in a bottle, so to speak.
Alistair uncorked the Heavenly Nectar Incense, raising it above his head. As the new owner of the item, but smoky incense inside heeded his command, staying inside its container. While the material held a formidable presence on its own, it had no real power in the world without the addition of an outside force.
Still, as a piece of an unblemished celestial realm, its presence was an unnatural place in the world. The Mana Storm recognized that, refocusing its attention on Alistair and his gourd. Alistair braced himself as a thick bolt of lightning came down from the sky.
He used every piece of defense he had to defy the will of the skies. Mana, Dao energy, and nue flooded his body, reinforcing it. Alistair still cried out in unimaginable agony. The lightning suffused his cells with wild, untamed, natural Mana.
However, the amount that struck him wasn’t even half of the total lightning’s output. Almost all the energy poured into the gourd, combining with the incense. To finish it off, Alistair poured his own Dao energy into the mix, a necessary step in the process. If he just let the lightning combine with the incense alone, it would remain an inert, soulless mixture.
The Dao that aligned most with lightning was obviously Justice, so Alistair unleashed his Justice Node into the gourd. The Dao energy left him far faster than he anticipated, as the gourd pulled on it like it had a mind of its own. Through gritted teeth, Alistair acquiesced to the item’s greedy desires, not holding anything back.
The Mana Storm responded in turn. Many smaller bolts came down from the sky, joining together with the main, continuous stream of lightning that refused to stop. Heavenly Nectar Incense couldn’t handle the additional load, so it passed along to Alistair.
He stood on the verge of losing consciousness. Something had to give. He could feel the Justice and lightning combine into that same form of quasi-physical substance he remembered Dragonus using. At last, Alistair lowered his arm and bottled the gourd, haggardly [Dashing] away.
The Mana Storm was relentless in its fury, sending a different type of attack against Alistair in lieu of the red lightning. A column of time and space affinity Mana shot down from the heart of the clouds, possessing congealed energy even denser than the lightning.
Alistair turned and readied himself to stop it, but Oliver already had it covered.
With one portal, he unleashed the Sun’s End Vanquishment Sword. He had it attached to a launcher within the [Otherworld Gate], and fired it at the column in a blur of motion. Yet that wasn’t all that came with the sword. Alistair glimpsed something attached to the hilt of the sword—or someone.
It was Anthony’s skeleton, though looked more alive with semi-transparent rings of flesh-like ectoplasm surrounding the bones. Oliver had clearly beefed up one of his strongest summons since the last time. He had named his creation Bob, not wanting to honor Anthony.
In another portal, he unveiled a titanic snake—the body of Sessen Esshei. Alistair almost wanted to complain that it was unfair Oliver was getting more powerful off of Alistair’s fallen enemies.
The serpentine corpse opened its mouth and unleashed a black hole. The gravitation pull warped the air and it shot toward the spacetime column.
Oliver clearly had supreme confidence in his zombie if he was willing to risk Bob against the Mana Storm’s wrath. As Bob swung his majestic katana in a huge arc, the black hole exploded upon contact with the stream of Mana, sucking in a large portion into its eternal void. In an instant, it took up half the energy and collapsed in on itself, leaving no trace behind.
Bob’s slash with the Sun’s End Vanquishment Sword took care of the rest. Void and destruction Mana combined in a bipartisan beam that swept away the incoming attack. Channeling the power of chaos, it turned the sky to daises and butterflies, which floated down harmlessly.
Alistair gave Oliver an approving nod. Certainly more elegant than what I would have done, Alistair thought.
“That’s for sure,” Dev’rox said. “You would have punched it like a caveman.”
With its two major attacks thwarted, Alistair could feel as plain as day that the Mana Storm had expended a fair amount of its power. Even its rumbles and monumentous gusts felt more muted. Which offered an opportunity.
Alistair activated [Eyes of Truth], peering into the heart of the storm. While observing it with his aura sense was essentially a higher-fidelity version of his normal vision, Karmic sight was a different story. Even his aura sense couldn’t penetrate the incredibly dense inner core of the storm, but his Karmic sight could.
Using his perception of threads of Fate, he found something strange at the center. A rift in reality, with a sentient being at the center. An elemental beast, of the pure Mana affinity.
The storm started running away immediately, leaving him with little time to think. Alistair didn’t warn Oliver of what he was about to do, crouching to the ground and springing into the air with the coiled release of his immensely powerful hamstrings. He flew dozens of meters into the air, with a decent amount of forward momentum.
Dev’rox had already felt his intentions, moving into position smoothly. Alistair activated [Dash], using Dev’rox’s head as a stepping stone. The rest of the way lacked solid ground, so he was still subject to gravity like any other flying object, but his current momentum would last long enough for him to reach the eye of the storm.
Alistair pressed together his hands, using himself as the grounding for his electrical Skill.
Skill Upgraded: [Lightning of Justice] (Tier 2 Legendary Skill): Strike the Earthly ground and bring down the illuminating Lightning of Justice from afar. Mana Cost: 60. Upgradeable (0/200).
Alistair frowned for a moment at the Skill text. Wasn’t there a change to the wording, adding “illuminating” to the description? That had never happened before.
In any case, the golden lightning obliterated the sanctum of the clouds. Rainbow-colored Mana burst away like a blood spatter from a bullet wound. His target was in sight—the Mana was thick enough to swim in at that point, and Alistair did, frenziedly thrusting himself forward.
The being at the center of the storm was humanoid in figure, but with no features at all. It was a mass of pure affinity Mana, presenting as a mixture of glowing blue and white Mana, in a form that could not quite be described as a solid, liquid, or gas, but a strange mixture of all three.
With no face, Alistair thought could pass as a horror movie villain. It seemed surprised to see an intruder in its sacred abode. The beast floated in a mass of condensed rainbow Mana above a thin, ten-meter rift.
Alistair recognized it as the same type of construction as he had found in the earthquake lava rifts back in New Boston. Once you destroyed the final boss, the rift disappeared.
For all the power that the storm possessed, the beast was easy pickings. Perhaps it was weakened from expending so much energy. Alistair cut it in half with a simple [Blood Hand], savoring the life force after.
The moment he killed the beast, the rift disappeared, and the resulting Mana Storm. In less than ten seconds, the immense cloud of Mana all across the spectrum dissipated into the atmosphere. No longer drawn to a single point by the rift and beast, Mana settled back into the land where it belonged.
Alistair casually fell from the sky. With his improved Fall of Fleet, it was like jumping an inch onto a cushioned pillow.
The ground didn’t feel the same way, with his boots distributing his immense weight into the earth, creating a small crater. Alistair dusted the dirt off his robes, breathing deeply. The wound in the world was gone. Mana had returned.
Already the color was returning to the soil and sky and tiny lifeforms. Off in the distance, it was still black-and-white, but at least in their vicinity, they saw the beauty of color.
Oliver caught up to him. “You dropped this.”
He handed him the golden gourd that now contained a justice-fueled Dao material.
“I was worried it would explode in my hands,” Oliver told him. “I have a feeling it will be useful, if you can manage to keep it safe.”
Alistair understood the meaning of his words when he tried to put it in his inventory. It just wouldn’t work. Unfortunately, that made a lot of sense. The inventory was an interior physical location dug into their soulcore. According to the records, such an ability should have only been capable for an Adept and up, but the Sublimed Machine Faction played loose with the rules of cultivation with their technological abilities.
His nascent soul couldn’t handle the ridiculous amount of concentrated quintessence. Which presented a problem. He would have to keep the gourd on his person at all times, at least if he wanted it to be useful in a pinch. If George Moulin popped out of nowhere, having it in a safe back home would be useless.
Alistair was lucky that his Mammothskin Raiment had ample pockets, and that Felix had kept those pockets intact and even expanded them. He placed the gourd inside his robe and turned to Oliver.
“Looks like we’re going to have to go stormchasing.”