Alistair was so bored that seeing something new made his heart leap for joy.
He had been meditating the mysteries of the Ghost and Justice, trying to bring up his other Dao Nodes to the prominence his Fist currently held. So far no luck, but that was to be expected. The Dao Fruit prize for completing [Vanquishing the Devil Kings] was his best bet for a sure improvement.
The other thing he had been trying was testing Spiritual Fighter’s Echo. Alistair was as certain that the sun would rise in the morning that this was his best bet for forming a proto-Domain. The 15% strength afterimages that followed his basic strikes were the physicalization of the Dao. Exactly what he needed for his proto-Domain. There wasn’t a lot of progress on that front, sadly.
Which was why when Alistair saw that one of the prizes for the Grand Dungeon was an Insight Vision for the creation of a proto-Domain, he almost instinctively hit accept without thinking.
After shoring up his foundations in the Fist, Alistair knew he had bridged most of the technical gap between those geniuses like Pharaoh and himself. The difficulty that came from the complexity of the meeting of his three disparate Daos was a bridge he would surely cross through study, especially now that he had the Spiritual Fighter’s Echo to study.
That was why the possibility of that one Insight Vision was so tempting. No longer did he need a whole three Insight Visions, as Dev’rox told him back a couple months ago.
But he refrained from his instincts, for now. A few minutes of thinking it over wouldn’t matter since he had four hours to decide how to proceed.
Four hours to proceed… which Alistair assumed was to give the leaders time to gather their dungeon clearing parties.
The problem was that Alistair had no party.
In front of him were eight mirrored discs that looked remarkably similar to Teleportation Circles, except they were more silverish in color. Twelve surrounded one in a ring, the center one being larger than the others. The position of the leader.
“Do you think—” Alistair began.
“It should do the trick,” Dev’rox interrupted. “The Pathfinder AI’s powers exceed that of any Foundation realm. When you get sucked up into the dungeon, you’ll be leaving this alternative Fate stream. With nothing left to anchor you here, when you return, you should be where you left off, in your headquarters.”
“Yeah, okay,” Alistair said, his mind calculating in a mad dash. “Okay.”
If he entered the Grand Dungeon, who knows how long he would be in there? If he could finish it. The Pathfinder AI promised it would be extremely difficult, meant to be cleared by a diverse party.
On the other hand, if he didn’t go in, who knows how long he would be on the moon? It might have been a shorter period than doing the Grand Dungeon, but he would be permanently missing out on the rewards, which were some of the best he had ever seen since the initiation.
There was also the knowledge that the Devil Kings would almost certainly be undergoing their own Symphony of Skills. While they probably got worse rewards than a solo clear, anything that imbalanced the scales between him and the Iceman could be deadly.
Iceman, Alistair thought, remembering George Moulin’s old nickname. I wonder if people still call him that?
Alistair let his scarlet bracelets morph into their true forms—clawed metal gauntlets that gleamed in the sun’s distant light. He had already made up his mind. Had he gotten this far from being timid? There was only one course of action he could take. The solo clear.
However, he did not enter immediately. For the next three and a half hours, Alistair meditated through in the Kai’tazake Mutra, entering a sublime mental state. It wasn’t a draw on his Dao energy like the Tranquil Mind or anything so Dao-touched, but a natural disposition.
During this time, he fully recuperated from his injuries within the Holy Ravine and recovered more of his Karmic energy. In addition, he ate some of [Carmela’s Happy Pies]. Moonpies were just as scrumptious as Earth ones, though he could have sworn they had a cosmic aftertaste.
He stopped his trance thirty minutes before the time limit ended, not wanting to push his luck too hard. He had arrived. His condition was at its peak, ready to face down the numerous challenges of the Symphony of Skills.
Alistair stepped up onto the central silvery disc and hit accept.
----------------------------------------
George Moulin surveyed his seven compatriots. The only one not among their number was the Fifth Devil King, Chameleon, who was off serving his own purpose.
He took out a cigarette. An old habit, one that he had promised himself to stop many times before the initiation. He had never quit. The good humor of the multiverse decided that one of his Class Skills would allow him to conjure them.
They were no ordinary cigarettes. While he held it with his teeth, he placed a single index finger at the end and pulsed a tiny amount of his ice affinity Mana. The cigarette lit up, not with flames, but with glowing ice. Somehow, it still had the same effect, sating an addiction that had long disappeared. He tossed it aside after exhaling once.
“Get on,” he told them. The lesser Devil Kings scurried like rats on a boat to their positions, with him at the center. “Let’s finish this quickly.”
----------------------------------------
> 0 hours after the start of the Grand Dungeon
>
> Sector One: The Furnace of Impure Flames
Alistair was in Hell.
He was in the middle of an enormous cavern. There were columns of jagged black rock interspersed with rivers of red flame. The air smelled of sulfur and a shimmering haze covered everything.
The mountains of black rock extended forever in all directions except downward. As far as he could see in the sky, there was always another layer of fire, another spire of rock.
More fire? Alistair thought. Haven’t we had enough of that?
His complaints fell on deaf ears.
The flames weren’t as hot as the inner portion of Selephita’s territory, and his Mammothskin Raiment’s cold and heat protection was more than double since then. Alistair found the Furnace of Impure Flames no hotter than a temperate fall day. For the moment.
A small map screen appeared in his vision, showing barebones features of the terrain like which sections were rocky and which sections were flame, seemingly from the ground level that Alistair was on. The most important part was an offscreen pulsing dot. There was a golden dot at the perimeter of the map, highlighting that it was further away.
“Will things be that easy?” he asked aloud.
“Let me sleep until you really need me,” Dev’rox replied. “I’m still recovering.”
Alistair gave him a thumbs up and started heading toward the golden dot. A few minutes in, he first realized the insidious nature of the fires.
It should have been obvious from the name of the sector. But as Alistair traversed through the hellscape, the flames grew stronger. They were dirty and dark, verging on maroon and barely luminous. A strange feeling overtook him.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Not that strong at first, it was like a brain fog that made him want to lay down his arms. These foreign thoughts triggered an alarm in Alistair’s mind. If he was not so practiced in controlling his mental states through mindful meditation, he never would have figured out that the origin of the thoughts was not indigenous.
His Dao Heart was being assailed.
Like the minute whispers of a devil on his shoulder—no, Alistair caught himself, like a state politician whispering on his shoulder, the flames tried to infect his very being. They promised power, immortality, and more, as long as he abandoned his path. As long as he forsook justice, ghost, and the fist, the impure furnace would reward him.
Alistair rejected this ideology. His Dao Heart was not so weak that these flames could convert him. He pushed onward, retreating to his Tranquil Mind. In the respite of pure serenity, Alistair knew that the profane cries of the impure flames were nothing but empty lies. They could not shake his faith in his path.
At the point where he needed Tranquil Mind to resist the false promises, he started seeing the sinners.
They were people—at least; he thought they were people. Their skin was blackened and cracking apart like ash, as if they were an overcooked steak. They wailed incessantly and didn’t seem to notice him at first.
All of them were repeating a task. Over, and over, and over.
He saw one ripping out his tongue, bleeding out, only for the appendage to knit back together and the blood to return to his body. The whole process then started anew. The husk of a man screamed the entire time, louder than the others, and Alistair could actually make out his words.
“I lied, I lied, I lied! I lied, please have mercy! I didn’t mean for him to burn for my lies!”
A woman in what once was a fine dress had her heart fall out, and then she had to scramble to catch it as it bounced away from her to another man. Once it got to the man, he froze and shattered into a million pieces, taking himself along with the heart and then the process would start anew.
Their punishments fit their sins, Alistair realized, leading to why he started calling them sinners. The couple must have been an adulterous woman and man. The tongueless man was a prevaricator.
Alistair surveyed the infinite cavern with serenity. This wasn’t justice. It was unnecessarily cruel. While it was a cliché statement, an eye for an eye made the whole world blind. But despite his dislike of the savagery, he felt nothing but peace—such was the wont of Tranquil Mind.
After a few hours of jogging forward in the sinner’s land, Alistair felt rebuffed. He was perhaps halfway to the golden dot, but the intensity of the impure flames ratcheted up. The rivers of fire grew larger, spreading into the air into loops intersecting the dark mountains and outgrowths.
“Join us,” they whispered in inscrutable voices. “Become one with the flame.”
Those dirty flames licked his skin and soothed his body. Tranquil Mind held out their influence, but for how long? His improved Kai’tazake Mutra state had a higher Dao energy upkeep. A very small amount, mind you, but he didn’t want to use any more of his resources than he had to. There were still nine more sectors.
Alistair turned back, temporarily heading for safer lands. He let himself out of Tranquil Mind and started to think.
If his unsullied equanimity wasn’t sufficient to fully block out the insidious whispers, what on his level would be? Brute force couldn’t be the answer. That left only one conclusion—the sinners. They were the only other notable feature about the Furnace of Impure Flames.
Alistair ran away from the core of profanity until he encountered one of the blackened husks. This one was shot over and over by invisible bullets until it became a shredded hunk of flesh, riddled with intersecting bullet holes until it fell to the ground to be reborn. A murderer, then? Perhaps someone who had killed with a gun.
For all the time he had been inside of Sector One so far, he hadn’t come within ten meters of one of the sinners. He had stayed far clear of them, and they hadn’t bothered him.
That changed now. The moment he breached three body lengths of the crowned man, he stared straight at Alistair’s soul. His eyes were pools of darkness without end. A primeval fear welled up in his throat.
The husk stopped everything he was doing and rushed Alistair with his head tilted forward and his arms behind him. With his Karmic vision and danger sense, he knew no attack was coming and let the charred man run right up to him where Alistair held his gaze, willing to challenge the abyss.
The man opened his mouth and a raspy voice came out, almost as if his vocal cords had been seared. “When I die I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. When I die I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves. When I die I will be reborn in paradise and all that I have killed will become my slaves.”
Alistair felt chills down his spine as he listened to the husk repeat its mantra over and over and over. He studied the being carefully. There was no threat besides his own cowardice. So what to do?
The first thing he tried was the remedy that was obviously the best in the multiverse—a healthy punch. He slammed his gauntleted fist into the sinner’s face.
The husk’s skull exploded from Alistair’s immense blow, which carried the momentum of over 500 points of Strength. Luckily for him, there was no blood or gore, only withered flesh that barely looked human.
After ten seconds, the man’s flesh reformed. Once again, he continued to get in Alistair’s face and chant his bizarre creed. Alistair found it oddly familiar, like he had heard that quote before, but he couldn’t place it.
Seeing that killing the sinner would do nothing, Alistair tried running away. Not because he was scared, but he wanted to see what kind of behavior this action would trigger.
The gunshot sinner followed him no matter what. No matter where Alistair climbed, or what he did, that strange dead man scrambled after him in that same disturbing manner of running. He even matched Alistair’s speed, despite him going at full throttle.
Interesting, Alistair noted. What if I try this?
Alistair climbed up one of the enormous black rock pillars, the husk chasing after him. Below was one of the rivers of fire, burning with nefarious flame. The combustion river flowed in the air and passed through the earth, right under the shadow of the pillar.
Standing on the precipice, his stomach dropped as he looked over the edge. I’m never going to get over heights, am I?
He jumped.
At the last second as he fell, he called on Dev’rox for a brief moment. The imp was annoyed but listened to his command, appearing for a brief moment. This allowed Alistair to use the imp’s heart-shaped face as a stepping stone for the airwalking of [Dash]. He safely landed a few meters in front of the river, cutting off [Dash] short.
The husk was less fortunate.
He fell into the concentrated stream of fire face-first. While it already looked like he had been burned, the rivers of flame were stronger. In an instant, his body combusted inside the dark fires. The whispers of the impure flames died by the smallest amount.
Baptism in fire, Alistair thought. The sins of the denizens of the sector fueled the air of iniquity, yet they were also being punished. As Alistair expected, even those sinners were not immune to the rivers, in fact, they seemed especially vulnerable.
Now he had the key to moving forward. Unfortunately, he had a problem—he had spotted over a hundred of those husks on his way to the golden dot.
Well, here I go.
----------------------------------------
> 0 hours after the start of the Grand Dungeon
>
> Sector One: The Furnace of Impure Flames
George Moulin let out a puff of his magical cigarette. The ice instantly melted and then evaporated in the torrid heat.
His seven Devil Kings looked toward him for guidance. The Shadow Twins, Jakk, Morgana, Hephaestus, Monk, and Heavyset.
He surveyed the sector. Vast rivers of maroon flame flowed through volcanic rock with no end. There was no sky—only more hell. The air was hot but not unbearable for the one least capable of handling the sector, the Thirteenth Devil King, Heavyset. For himself, it was nothing. His cold would not fail.
George flicked his cigarette on the ground. He gathered the energy of two Dao Nodes—Magic and Ice—congealing it within his tongue where he added ample Mana from his turbulent soulcore.
Next came nue. For spells in the lettered ranks of F-A, nue was unnecessary. Not so for his Rank 1 spell. In his five Arcanous Devil spells, nue was essential. Undiluted willpower and imagination.
George spoke the name of his spell, codifying imagination into sacred speech. “Arcanous Devil Spell #1: Glacial Front.”
An esoteric seal emerged from the ground, glowing in mystical blue energy, radiating the heart of winter. The arcane array grew—soon it could fit a house, and then a football field inside it. Once it had grown to max capacity in less than a second, the glacier emerged.
As the name of the spell suggested, it summoned a glacier. A moving glacier. The chunk of ice appeared instantly out of a thin air with the array having expanded underneath them, so the glacier carried them along with it. George modulated the expansion of the glacier so as to not to harm his allies.
From the moment of its birth, the glacier struggled against the world of flames. It was a cold aberration that should not have been born in such a hot place. Yet with the power of George’s imagination, it was there. He had six uses of Rank 1 spells that recharged every thirteen hours, so he would not let it go to waste.
Once fully formed, the glacier was a gargantuan block of ice over twenty meters tall, with a surface covered in steam. Then, it moved.
Slowly at first, it accelerated every second. It would start at a glacial pace, but once it started going, it was almost impossible to stop.
“Jakk!” George called. “These flames feel familiar. Your concepts are similar?”
There was so much steam that no one could see a thing, but he felt his subordinates presence only a few body length’s away on the top of the glacier.
“Yes, sir!” Jakk called out. “I can sense the flames have a brother to my Dao Node.”
“Stand as our bulwark against the seduction,” George ordered. “No stopping.”