In the moment of his victory, Alistair was temporarily returned to the all-white lobby, though this time he floated in the air as a variety of screens barraged his vision.
Besides the Cosmic Blood Badge window, he also took a look at the leaderboards before he left.
The little avatar of a crystal dragon still stood at number one—that had to be the guy Fuhao referred to as “the future of the Disputed Shard.” Down from 6th place all the way to 13th was the bow and arrow-wielding iceman. Alistair didn’t put too much stock in his high placing since Prime Initiates like themselves got some affirmative action in the form of taking along seven other teammates.
Well, except for Alistair himself. He had to do it the way everyone else did and still got a top 100 placing. That had to count for something, if he wasn’t tooting his own horn.
The rewards—oh, the rewards were so juicy. 250 Upgrade Points for clearing all ten sectors. 400 for the overall Symphony of Skills Grand Dungeon. 200 Upgrade Points from the Badge. That meant 850 total, along with 50 Platinum drachma.
Unfortunately, Alistair wasn’t the first through, so he didn’t get the Legendary rarity item. The way things were looking, there was almost no way that George didn’t get the reward. Just another thing to worry about.
Then there was the part Alistair was most intrigued by—the Insight Vision. He was wondering what was going to happen, and those questions were answered the moment he finished going through all the windows.
Alistair had forgotten all about where he was when he entered the Grand Dungeon—the moon. Getting transported into an alternative Fate stream was not one of Alistair’s greatest hits. Luckily, he saw the glass outline of the Leading Domes right before the Insight Vision started. No more journeys in space for the time being was acceptable to Alistair, as much as he enjoyed the idea of wandering the great beyond. Instead, his sight turned inward.
----------------------------------------
There was fear in the air.
Rampant dread, the kind that no one likes to talk about. The feeling of utter hopelessness. Alistair was subsumed in this singular mental state.
He opened his eyes, bathed in blood. Dark, congealed sanguine fluid flooded down in the shape of a dome. Ectoplasmic blood mist filled the air as it splashed and churned with scalding heat. From the ceiling to the ground, malevolent wraiths circled, wailing the laments of the damned.
This can’t be right, Alistair thought. How is this horror my Insight Vision?
The screams of the bloodwraiths grew louder and their rotation accelerated. The blood grew thicker and the oppressive dread grew stronger.
In the blink of an eye, the blood halted, flooding inward like a metaphysical dam had broken. The wraiths dived into Alistair’s psychic body. There was then a period of darkness.
A vision within a vision. After the hatred and vile imputation of the bloodwraiths entered him, space and time inverted, black sky turning to white ether and red blood turning into golden light.
In this new paradise, Alistair ascended into the Heavens at an increasingly fast pace. Joyful spirits of the dead heralded his rise with a choral arrangement written by the divine progeny.
Higher and higher Alistair went, soaring through golden sky into golden space, through what he imagined were the infinitely complex fractals of the Heavens. In what felt like was endless time, he finally arrived at the summit.
Alistair stood before a palace whose size beggared belief. Iridescent in color, shining with hues that were beyond his mortal mind, it stretched to the horizon and back many fold. The gates to the palace were an empyrean gold that burned and toiled with ancestral pride, keeping all unprivileged and unqualified away from the holy interior for uncountable spatial epochs.
Except for Alistair. He was one hundred percent certain that whatever qualifications these golden gates were looking for, he was not even close to meeting, yet he was somehow immune to its terminating aura. It was as if he was clouded in a darkness that made him causally distinct from the rest of the world. Or, more likely, this was just a vision.
A foreboding presence loomed inside of the palatial complex. A locus of evil so foul and rancid, Alistair wanted to fall to his knees and cry. Cry and despair, for this being of pure wickedness was the most powerful entity he had ever witnessed, by a chasm so large he could not comprehend it.
If there was any future to the multiverse, it was to be ruled by this god. A dystopia of unspeakable horror. Alistair’s mind threatened to break apart at the seams at this thought. This can’t be right, he repeated to himself over and over for what felt like eternity as he knelt in accidental prostration before the evil deity.
This couldn’t be the terminal state of everything. Alistair refused to believe the ultimate evolution of the multiverse was toward everything being in the palm of inexorable evil.
A light fluttered down from the void above. At first, he was too in the mud to even recognize what the illumination was. But the light grew closer and shone brighter with each passing second, to where even Alistair in his deep despair, had to look up.
What he found was resplendent awe. The light came from a small glyph, a character in a language that he inherently knew to be the Language of the Pure Dao. The First Script, as Dev’rox put it.
Only this character’s prominence far exceeded the corrupted meaning of the one in the Holy Ravine. The Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Struggle character had been copied and copied for thousands or possibly even millions of years, leading to its dilution. Alistair knew that this one was different.
Its meaning was entirely pure. He was witnessing the glory of the First Script and somehow his brain didn’t turn into mush. Whatever protected him from the presence of the evil god also had to be protecting him from the true power of the glyph.
Alistair wasn’t expecting to understand anything about the mysterious Language of the Pure Dao, but he was wrong. The character floating above him looked very, very familiar. In fact, it was almost identical to Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Struggle, with small alterations. Alterations that he also understood.
The meaning of the floating glyph was not Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Struggle, but Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Evil. The parts of the character that meant evil stood out to Alistair like a sore thumb, radiating the same absolute aura coming from the devil within the palace.
All of a sudden, it all clicked. Like a cascade of falling dominoes, Alistair grasped the meaning of the Insight Vision. The ocean of blood at the beginning, the circling of the bloodwraiths—that was what his judgment of evil felt like, from the perspective of the judged.
Drowning in the blood of the innocents they slew, haunted by the ghosts of their past. Alistair did not inflict misery for misery’s sake, but if the damned were to punish themselves by their past evil, who was he to stop them? This concept linked back to his previous idea of the helping the angry ghost that desired bloody revenge, but there was a distinction.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
From his current viewpoint, that was too savage and did not represent what he wanted to be. His time in the Holy Ravine had tamed his more angry ideas. However, taking that idea of anger and blood and incorporating the spirits of the dead was still valuable. The cosmic justice of having their victims assail the evildoers of the multiverse was sweet.
This association, Alistair was certain of. The heavenly ascent aspect of the Insight Vision, he wasn’t sure of. There wasn’t a connection of ice to ghost to justice that was immediately apparent to him, though he was sure he would eventually come up with something.
Finally, the evil in the palace and Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Evil. That was obvious.
What was Alistair’s purpose at his core? Why did he fight so hard? To survive, yes. Almost all living beings had that goal, along with the safety of their close kin. Not so unique. But since the beginning, since luck and providence had him save a life at the start of the initiation, he had a higher goal.
To rid the multiverse of evil and suffering. To create a world where no one had to lose a parent, a lover, a child. Where everyone could live in harmony. To this end, he would pursue, no matter how many called him naïve or juvenile, no matter how difficult it seemed or how many doubted its possibility.
But he was not alone. Through his time in the Holy Ravine, he had learned discipline and inner strength.
He did not cultivate those virtues in solitude.
Everyone learned from those before them, everyone was the product of their environment. As the great Isaac Newton said, “if I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
The presence of the evil god was his final opponent, the symbol of suffering within the universe that needed to be vanquished. And one day it would. By his hand, and those of all who shared his lofty goal, stretching back from the beginning of time. Whoever looked up at the Heavens and bemoaned the curse of mortal living, whoever brought light to darkness, whoever stood up to injustice despite their own fear—never once had the spark died out.
Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Evil—that would be the name of his Domain. The truest encapsulation of his identity, the spatial and temporal home that resided within his very soul.
A proto-Domain was the building blocks of that. As Alistair came back down to Earth, he etched as much as he could of what he remembered into his soulcore. His proto-Domain was complete.
----------------------------------------
When Alistair opened his eyes once more, he was back where it all started. The Leading Domes, the set of glass spheres that held his new and improved headquarters.
He had unassumingly triggered the Karmic alarm via Oracle’s Karmic curse, landing him on the moon. Now that the alternative Fate stream was well and gone, he was back there.
Back there eighteen days in the future, a fact that he hadn’t wanted to think about for quite some time. The lives lost, the opportunities squandered. There was also one possibility that Alistair dreaded above all others.
He checked his freehold overview. Unlike the rest of the sectors, during Cosmic Blood, he couldn’t access it.
It wasn’t looking good. When Alistair left, the Northeast Order had 35% of the world’s 159,873 subregions, the Devil Kings 25%, and various other groups at 40%.
Four days before entering the Cosmic Blood sector of the Grand Dungeon, Alistair had noticed a sudden rise in the Devil Kings’ territorial holdings. At the time, he had assumed that meant that the Devil Kings had finished their dungeon instance, and it looked like he was right. In the eleven days that George and his ilk ran free, they already went from 25% to 45%. At least Alistair’s people managed to stave off their losses, going from 35% to 30%.
In just eleven days… Alistair thought. Eleven days for the Devil Kings to take tens of thousands of subregions. They were dangerously close to the 50% condition that gave them an instant win.
Alistair checked [Armageddon], looking at The Second Step. There were 4.5 days left until the third wave. Each successive wave was supposed to be worse than the last, so he shuddered to think about what was coming next. Drastic action had to be taken.
First, he had to deal with the stares. Alistair started paying attention to his surroundings. The second floor was a lot sparser than last time. There were a few people working in the open cubicles who all had turned to see the sudden burst of energy that accompanied Alistair’s return.
There were two familiar signatures.
Alistair let William St. James tackle him for a hug, while Caren Locasta behind him shook his head, though he let his relief show in a smile.
“Alistair, I thought you’d never be back!” William exclaimed. Alistair gingerly put the young man down. How strange to think that he had been one of his opponents during [The Game of Life]. “What happened?”
Alistair gave a brief explanation about Oracle’s alternative Fate stream and the Grand Dungeon.
“That’s quite the adventure you went on,” Caren noted. “You’ve had a busy couple of weeks.”
“I can say the same here,” Alistair replied. “What the hell is going on here?”
Caren and William looked at each other. “It might be better if we show you,” Caren said.
They led the way to the center of the war room, where an enormous projection of the globe took center stage. It was an improved version of the map in Alistair’s old headquarters, describing the state of every known subregion on Earth to the greatest possible detail. The work was a fusion of the best programming and engineering that the Northeast Freehold could muster, and updated more than once a second, taking in information from first-hand accounts, the Soulnet, status windows, drones, animal familiars, and more. Some of the younglings from Sessen Esshei’s brood had volunteered to dig tunnels to the hard to reach parts of the world.
The globe showed a catastrophe. The two main colors were purple and red—purple for Alistair’s freehold, and red for the Devil Kings.
The red virus had spread from its origin, taking over large swaths of purple land. The other colors were struggling to survive, having been reduced to 25% of the world’s subregions.
That fact infuriated Alistair. Their leaders should have seen the writing on the wall. There was no path forward except for humanity to unite. They had seen their holdings get smashed and stolen by the Devil Kings for almost two weeks and they hadn’t come to John and begged to join?
It wasn’t that Alistair cared at all for gaining political power, but it stung him to think about all the innocent lives lost by the greed of those leaders. He wanted a sit down with President Ryder, but he had a feeling that would have to wait.
Besides having 14% of the Northeast Order Freehold’s subregions converted to the other side, there was also the pressing concern of the roaming monsters. Looking at the holographic globe, over 20% of their subregions were overrun with monsters. With Alistair gone and the Devil Kings attacking, it looked like they could not clear all the dungeons in the time limit, leading to them running rampant.
“More or less my median prediction,” Alistair said. “Things could be worse, couldn’t they?”
“Things can always get worse,” William said. “Though they can always get better too, right?”
Caren scratched his chin while the three of them stared at the enormous map. “Everyone is trying to abate the tides. It’s not working. They’ll fulfill the Global Mayorship 50% requirement in just three days at the current pace.”
“And Alexandra? And the others?” Alistair asked calmly.
William shook his head. “None of the high-ranking members of the Northeast Order Freehold have died. We tell them to flee at the first sight of George. Still, it’s somewhat surprising.”
“Death is second nature on the front lines,” Caren murmured. “Millions have perished and hundreds of thousands die every day. We cannot deal with the monsters and the Devil Kings at the same time. That is the difference between us and them. George leaves his ‘people’ to perish. If we include those under the thrall of the Devil Kings, the death toll is astronomical.”
Alistair tasted the melancholy in the air. The psychic energy of the world felt despondent. Not that he ever would have used such mystical terminology before, but that was his gut feeling. The amount of despair was palpable, like an eclipse casting its darkness over the Earth.
“There’s no time to waste,” Alistair said, not even realizing the sigh of relief he gave at hearing Alexandra and the others were safe. “I have to be out there now. Where’s the optimal spot?”
“Debatable,” William replied. “There’s a major attack by Morgana in the southeast. The Devil Kings have tended to stick together. If you attack them directly, George is likely to come out. Think you can take him?”
Alistair wanted to say yes with confidence, but the truth was, he wasn’t sure. In due time, the answer was without a shadow of a doubt, yes, but right now? Maybe. “I need more time to be certain of that. What else?”
“Technically, that wouldn’t be the cause of the most deaths,” Caren pointed out. “Over in the north, where the Maine Brothers’ land is, there’s an overrun of orcs from one of the dungeons. The monsters are running amok since we have to deal with the Devil King incursions. Our only saving grace is that they still count as our subregions even if the monsters control them de facto.”
Orcs, Alistair thought. Can’t say they’re not making a comeback.
“Keep in mind, Alistair, three days,” Caren said. “We have to make some progress or we’re screwed.”
“I haven’t forgotten, promise,” Alistair said. “Beam me up, Scotty.”
“You know that wasn’t actually said in any Star Trek movie or show?” William asked. “I’m disappointed.”
“Says the guy who claimed to kill a grizzly with a machete.” Alistair smiled as he sprinted onto one of the many Teleportation Circles lining the perimeter.
Before William could respond, Caren activated the protocols, allowing him to control the destination from the master key holder. Alistair disappeared in a flash of blue light.