The tribulation was a piece of cake.
When Alistair hit level 60, he didn’t find himself in a vision. He was struck by lightning.
That wasn’t supposed to happen. A true Heavenly tribulation where he was smote by lightning would occur upon the breakthrough to Adept. The “tribulations” of the Pathfinder AI were in some sense false ones, though they weren’t bad.
The Pathfinder had simply decided that the best improvement it could give him for reaching level 60 was a simulation of his future experience.
Alistair found himself on a deserted island. Blue lightning descended from the sky for hundreds of miles, razing this imaginary sea into nothingness. The infinite torching of the welkin closed in on his tiny body.
Is this what a true tribulation is like? Alistair wondered. He was so caught up in its awesome power that he forgot it was going to hit him.
Burning agony filled every cell in his body. The Heavens were furious with him, like all cultivators. To cultivate was to steal immortality as a mortal fated to die. To steal energy when it didn’t belong to you.
Alistair thought it was mild. It hurt in a different way than the purgatorial flames of the Steel Body trial, but the end result was way less pain. Having overcome far worse, he found it easy. Physical pain wasn’t enough to cow him, and his body was incredibly sturdy.
Perhaps that was why the Pathfinder gave him the tribulation. His stats had overreached too far above the limits of his cells. The pseudo-Heavens of the Pathfinder cleansed his body of impurities with the lightning, despite the pain.
When he woke up, he was surrounded by a smelly black gunk. Some of the impurities holding back his body were gone. Everything felt better, from the movements of his hands to the way that the winter air smelled. Alistair checked his status screen, eager to see his new stats, unburdened by their cap.
Name Alistair Tan Species Spectral Superhuman I (Partially Evolved) Bloodline
(Ghost) Blood Dragon [Peon] Class Magical Pugilist (Uncommon) Subclass (HIDDEN) Arbiter of Justice (Legendary) Level 60 Health 1,650/1,718 (3.092 per min) Mana 1,530/2,381 (5.142 per min) Stamina 793/1,093 (1.797 per min) Upgrade Points 23 Balance
3,170,155 Gold Drachma
201,257 Land Credits
Karma (Unlocked) +90/90 (.048 per min) Full Stat Bonuses +81% to All Attributes, +10% to Strength, Wisdom, +20% to Agility, Endurance, +5% to Charisma, +50% Mana Strength 518 Agility 1,001 Constitution 329 Endurance 382 Intelligence 576 Wisdom 325 Charisma 539 Items Zanibar’s Purification Ring, Thrice-Blessed Fate-Diviner, Devilsbane Gauntlets, Mammothskin Raiment, Fall of Fleet, Teleportation Circle, Heavenly Nectar Incense
Badges "Premium Initiate", "Good Samaritan", "Deliverance of Justice", "Mythical Cultivator", "Jack of All Trades", "World Leader", "Devil May, Cry", "1", “Cosmic Blood - Top 100 Performance”
Talents System Tree - Three leaves, Pugilism Branch (II), Chaos Assassin - Void Watching Branch (II), Merciful Abbot - Heart Cultivator (IV), Merciful Abbot - Justice Quest Branch (I), Lawful Magistrate (II), Elemental Fighter - Summoning of Spirit Branch (V), Body Tree - Heart Branch (I), Blood of the Devil - Sanguine Empowerment Branch (IV), Bloodline Evolution - (Ghost) Blood Dragon [Peon] Skills [Lightning of Justice], [Force Fist], [Blood Hand], [Frozen Claw], [Eyes of Truth], [Dash], [Monk Motionless], [Hand of Karma], [Ghost Whispers], [Spectral Summoning], [Carmela’s Happy Pies], [Draconic Roar], [Steel Body], [Thousand-Armed Bodhisattva Judgment]
Quests [Armageddon], [Vanquishing the Devil Kings] Achievements Discovery (I), Dueling (IV), Conquest (II), Dao Node - Dao of the Ghost (I) Dao Node - Dao of the Fist (II), Dao Node - Dao of Justice (I), Arcana (III)
Alistair allocated almost all of his free Attributes and “Deliverance of Justice” points to get that sweet over 1,000 Agility. For his Upgrade Points, in his last two levels with his Upgrade Points he had found the Merciful Abbot Branch of the Talent Tree, stemming from his Arbiter of Justice Subclass.
For the past few levels and upgrades, he had ignored the Talent Tree, but with nothing else to spend on, he had a closer look.
Alistair remembered way back when he tried to give Anthony Ricci a chance to surrender. An important part of his path was redemption. That good would prevail over evil. That it could prevail over evil in even the wickedest villain. That there was a goodness in every person.
His finishing Skill shone that light and rang that gong in its victims. Alistair could feel Dev’rox about to speak up in their bond, but he shushed him. He knew that attacking an enemy’s Dao Heart was possibly the most inefficient way to go about things. And his attacks weren’t revolving around that at the cost of everything else.
Alistair was a stubborn bastard and he wouldn’t let go of it, so why not improve it? After taking one of the first layer leafs that shored up his heart, he had obtained the Sanctifying Heart leaf that increased the effectiveness of attacks on the heart by 10%, and then now with his new points, he completed the second level Fear of Glorifying Truth leaf.
The leaf didn’t increase the chance of his heart attacks working, but they made it so that any time they feared they might work, their reaction time would slow due to indecision by 10% more. Since Alistair had the antithesis to slow reactions, he felt it would compound an advantage of his.
Alistair finally did some research in the Hall of Math and figured out why his instincts to use his stolen blood essence to upgrade his bloodline and not his species were right. The benefits to a species upgrade were more mystical than practical, with most of the tangible benefits like higher stat caps not being applicable to the average joe. Even for a stat monster like Alistair, he could increase the cap via bloodline instead.
Species evolutions didn’t even start giving raw stats until way, way down the line, like the Lazarene Minister said. Bloodline upgrades were basically just better and more varied for almost every species, since they were the inherited special abilities of a powerful individual.
There was an additional danger, even for those who had the resources—going more than one above your specified one evolution per realm invited heart demons. Alistair could get his next species upgrade now and not suffer any consequences, but if somehow he then upgraded again before becoming a Foundation, that would be ruinous.
Having such a perfected body while the soul and mind were so far behind led to one worshiping the body. It was impossible to circumvent by any known method. Dev’rox was quite confident even in the multiversal heartlands no one went more than a realm above.
Those who dared improve their bodies like that and survived were called Martial Jiangshi, and their cultivation was forever deviated, unable to reach the peak in the standard fashion. If your Fate was running dry and you needed a lifeline to more power, it was not uncommon in some circles to become a Martial Jiangshi.
Alistair was creeped out by the idea. From what he understood, they weren’t actually jiangshi, but since he was a kid and his grandma told him stories about jiangshi, he found them scary. Not zombies, though, for some reason.
Speaking of bodies, his Attributes totaled 3,670. That had to be the highest in the world. No way George was matching him number for number. He had wondered how people were keeping up with him in stats—they weren’t, but they were being kept from being completely lapped by things like build manuals and Natural Inheritances. Sadly, Alistair’s path was a bit too unique for a build manual.
Alistair felt the effects of the missing impurities already as he took to the Great Plains. The wind whipped around his shoulder and snowflakes settled on his sleek jacket, covering the chengyu on his back.
The activation time for his Skills improved to the point where every single combat Skill he had was now viable for close-quarters combat. The Mana costs were down by around 15%, though they didn’t say so in their descriptions.
In addition, Alistair opened a hundred of the 349 remaining meridians in one go. The extra space allowed his Mana to flow at a more efficient pace, with much higher throughput. All of his Skills would benefit, especially his combat Skills which would become more powerful.
He could feel that his soulcore would ossify his Mana affinity choices after this point. As he went up to level 100, his meridians would become attuned to his four Mana types. After that point, using Skills that had to convert his soulcore Mana to a different type would be 10% as efficient as his inherent Mana affinities. If he wanted to make a change to his Mana path, it would have to be now. But Alistair was content.
Content with his progress, but not content with the fourth wave.
The Mindaugust’s Trial. After Kaiju Break, everyone was in terror at what the horrible next trial could be. What could top Beast Rulers that not even the top cultivators in the world could take head on?
Old man ghosts. That was right, Chinese grandpas popped up all over the world. They were dressed in changshans, and could have fit right in during the Qing Dynasty. A peculiar aesthetic choice for the Pathfinder AI, that Alistair might have found amusing if they weren’t so deadly.
The spirits were utterly indestructible and would ceaselessly meander until finding a living person. If you were selected, that was that. There was nothing else you could do but have a talk with the ghost.
Each one wanted something different. To answer a riddle. To solve a puzzle. To play a game of go. They never asked for something beyond your ability. If you didn’t know how to play go, they might choose chess instead. If you couldn’t prove there were an infinite amount of prime numbers, they might ask you to troubleshoot a broken car if you used to be a mechanic.
All of their tasks revolved around something intellectual. Something that made you use your mind. After natural disasters, dungeons, and kaijus, it didn’t sound so bad, but there was one terrible condition. If you failed at the task given to you, the spirit killed you.
That wasn’t so bad, right? Just one death? Nope. The spirit would go on a rampage in a vicinity based on badly you failed. It would split into as many spirits as necessary within whatever range it had and ask every single person in that range a question. This would continue onward forever, or at least until it ran out of people.
At least if you answered a question correctly, you got a one day grace period. That was only voluntarily, though. If you so chose, you could find wandering spirits to get questions, to save other people from the risk.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
You didn’t have to be altruistic, either. Answering questions correctly gave Contribution Score, experience, and drachma. It was the time of the mind over the body. All the nerds of the world rejoiced, though many of those nerds had since become fighters out of necessity.
So, the reason Alistair [Dashed] across the expanse was to catch as many spirits as possible. They seem to spawn with respect to population, only area, so he chose an unpopulated region to eliminate as many as possible.
Most likely because of his background where he knew some advanced math, the questions he got from the spirits were hard. Really hard. He got way more proofs and difficult logic puzzles than the average person. Thanks to Dev’rox, the games were fairly easy. The imp was skilled at almost every strategy game ever, according to him.
While the spirits had varying difficulties based on the person being tested, they also had inherent difficulties based on the color of their hat. Black was the easiest and white was the hardest, the rest falling in between.
Because of the conditions of the Mindaugust’s Trial, people congregated in densely populated areas. A few people would be designated as the trial takers and purposefully place themselves in front of the spirits to get asked a question. Alistair would compensate them even beyond the natural benefits, with compounding bonuses for those proven to be successful over multiple rounds.
This was because the worst problem was the exponential spirit growth when someone got a question wrong. Chains of wrong answers quickly threatened to kill everyone within an area who lacked the capacity to answer a question. It was a ruthless Darwinian culling that Alistair had come to expect from the Final Frontier Empire.
It would have been the worst death count of all four waves if not for the system that they have developed. By force of law, all citizens had to travel to the nearest large city. People like Alistair who had a successful track record would hunt down spirits in the empty expanses left behind, while other correct answerers guarded the hordes of people.
Thanks to their quick thinking, the largest amount of deaths came from the fighting. Some people took offense to the idea that there was a designated person getting the opportunity for advancement. Opportunities that, by wave four, were rare. They saw answering questions by spirits as an easier way to get ahead than fighting Beast Lords.
Even with the People’s Legion, they couldn’t enforce the rules everywhere while they had to deal with the rural spirits. Some of the fighting was unavoidable.
Thankfully, the spirits were attracted to those who had survived their past counterparts. You could feel them with your aura sense, and Alistair stopped in his tracks as he sensed the one of incomparable power.
The unspoiled plains offered no cover for anything. Alistair carefully approached the being he sensed from afar, unsure if there was going to be a fight, since the spirit was so abnormal.
“Come hither,” the spirit said. Alistair obeyed without consciousness, [Dashing] before the rainbow hat ghost. They had never seen a spirit hat of that color before, nor one that could force a person to come to it, rather than the human going to the spirit.
Alistair strained with all his might to move, but none of his muscles fired. Even Dev’rox was trapped within his body.
“Fret not,” the spirit said. He looked the same as the rest of them, but his aura was far deeper. Not that it made him a powerhouse, but Alistair felt a primordial essence to the ghost that surpassed his brethren. “I wish no harm upon you.”
“But if I fail your test, I will die?” Alistair asked.
“Well, that’s true. But it’s not as though I wish it.”
Alistair snorted. “You’re more talkative than the other ghosts. They’ll just ask the question or show me the game right away.”
“We can do that if you’d like.” The ghost gave him a warm smile that reminded Alistair of the earliest memories of his grandfather. “But I prefer conversation.”
“There’s less than a week left for the Mindaugust’s Trial,” Alistair said. “Would you be the final boss?”
“Something of the sort,” the spirit said. “You can call me River Flowing Towards An End. Or River, if you’d like.”
“Alright, River,” Alistair stretched his hands. “What game will we be playing?”
A twinkle appeared in River’s eye. “Why don’t I show you?”
----------------------------------------
Alistair never would have guessed the game they were about to play was tic-tac-toe. River produced a three-by-three grid the size of a go board, drawing it onto a perfectly flat piece of granite. They both sat on their knees in a sea of plains grass, strong winter winds forcing the stalks to sway back and forth. The cold bothered neither of them.
He gave Alistair five pieces of Gold drachma locked inside of a glass container, where he used five turtle shell bones each having an inscription on the back.
“Before we play, we must talk,” River said. “I might have lied about being able to play the game right away.”
“There are others in need,” Alistair said. He fiddled with the container, but the drachma wouldn’t come out and he couldn’t figure out how the lock worked in the slightest. “If I take too long, people might die.”
“They always do.” River closed his eyes, shaking his head. “Whether it be now or in a hundred thousand years, the mortal coil waits for no man.”
“But the dream of cultivators is to break that mortal coil,” Alistair countered, perhaps seeing where this was going. “To secure eternity. To reach the summit and go beyond.”
“Is that dream real? I wondered that often when I lived.”
“Of course it’s real. If it wasn’t, that would mean that all the trillions upon trillions of beings toiled for nothing. Plus, is that not what a Truthseeker is? Someone who has reached the pinnacle of cultivation and grasped true eternity?”
“Young pup, you have no idea of what you speak. How would you have the qualifications to know such a thing? Neither do I, for that matter. Even a billion years is nothing compared to infinity. A trillion trillion trillion years is nothing. How would you know if a Truthseeker can stake claim to forever?”
Alistair began to open his mouth, but he realized that River was correct. From what he gathered, an Exalted realm could live around fifteen million years, so given the multiplicative factors, a Truthseeker would at minimum be in the billions. But as River said, billions were not infinity.
“How would you know that they can’t live forever?” Alistair asked.
“I don’t,” River conceded. “It’s a guess. A guess informed by my understanding of the multiverse. I did not reach the realm of the Truthseeker, but I was no backwater farmer. I saw the peaks. Nothing lasts forever. All things are impermanent. We live under a Buddhist Heaven, do we not?”
There was a heavy silence in the air as Alistair contemplated the words of the old man ghost. Dev’rox was quiet as well, though he could feel that imp had his own thoughts on the matter, this discussion was not his to interfere with. River ended the nothingness by gesturing to the board. There was a sadness to his movement. A heavy weight that felt like an ancient burden. “You may place your stone.”
One of the five drachma teleported out of the case and into Alistair’s hand. Not being an idiot, he put his drachma in the center. River responded by putting his shell in the top right corner, from Alistair’s perspective. The inscription on the bone read “Eternity” in a familiar script. The Language of the Pure Dao.
However, even compared to the extremely watered down version of “Spirit’s Fists Overcoming Struggle,” the “Eternity” was trash. It barely communicated any meaning. If the glyph in the Holy Ravine was copied a hundred times, this was copied a thousand.
Alistair exhaled through his mouth, letting his hands rest on his lap. “If everything is impermanent, then one day the Heavens won’t be Buddhist anymore.”
“Perhaps,” River said. “But what do the scriptures say? The Buddha codified and explained the three marks of existence, but he did not invent them. If the Heavens shifted to claim an unchanging reality, would they win? Cultivators steal from the Heavens all the time, yet tribulations are not falling on them every second of every day until they are motes of dust. Nothing is omnipotent.”
“I don’t need to be omnipotent as long as I can accomplish my goals.”
“Goals are attachments to this world,” River admonished, though Alistair wondered if he really believed that. “They can only lead to misery. The more you possess, the more it shall hurt to lose your possessions. The warmest love and the sweetest kiss, the laughter of children and the blessing of health. The contentedness of the philosopher and the beatitudes of the monk. This is the cruelest gift of the multiverse.”
“Then what do you suggest? To not have goals is to not even be a cultivator, no?”
“There is no future and there is no past. There is the now and there is the forever, both existing and not existing at once. To become one with the Dao is to relinquish such earthly desires and act without acting. However, even at the level of such a perfected being, power is necessary.” River’s powers of prestidigitation with his turtle shells. “Omnipotence,” “Self,” “Civilization,” “War.” “You would need power of the highest order.”
“I’ll get as much power as I need,” Alistair said. Perhaps it was time to try a different track. “Is that what you did in your earthly life?”
River didn’t seem fazed that Alistair asked about his life. Instead, he gestured to the board. The drachma teleported into his hands once again, where he placed it in the bottom left corner, while the spirit placed the bone inscribed with “Omnipotence” in the top left.
“Getting ahead of yourself there, are you?” River looked down at his rapidly moving fingers. “I had forgotten your eyes were so keen. You must have read the remaining bones and thought yourself clever. Self, civilization, and war.”
While this spirit was unique, the rules of the games were always the same. Since nothing you could do as the human being tested could harm the questioner, anything was allowed. Alistair activated [Eyes of Truth]. They barely took on a crimson tint when he wasn’t allotting additional Karma for them.
More specifically, he was fishing for information using Lesser Vipassanā to detect inner truths not spoken aloud. It didn’t give him precise details, but it allowed his guesses to be far more informed.
“Our Pathfinder AI is lazy,” Alistair said, unafraid of being smote down. After hearing his bloodline’s progenitor say that Heaven didn’t really pay attention to the frontier, he stopped worrying about being snatched up by an archon, and the Pathfinder AI didn’t give one lick about being badmouthed. He had heard Alexandra say some very offensive things about the Emperor and the Pathfinder AI, but it never stepped in. “It modifies and reuses. It takes from what it’s given and rarely creates wholesale. Am I wrong in assuming you were once a cultivator in your own right? Based on the fact you were selected in a trial relating to the mind, you were probably someone that used their wits over their brawn. Some kind of mental cultivator?”
Mental cultivators were rare on the frontier, though not as rare as nue artists. While it was almost impossible to raise your intellect via stats, those who were already smarter to begin with were drawn to the mental arts.
River scoffed. “My brawn was fine enough, brat. Karmic bastards, always knowing more than they should.”
“I guessed right, then,” Alistair said. “Where are you from?”
“I’m the one that’s asking questions here,” River said, though he didn’t put his heart into it. “Far from here. A brat like you could run for ten thousand lifetimes and it would be but one step one forward toward the planet of my birth.”
“So far.” Despite River not having indicated anything, a drachma appeared for him to place a drachma in the top middle row. River didn’t play his stone right away. “How did you and your brothers come to be ghosts a million universes away, used as a trial for a Foundation on a newly initiated planet?”
River picked up the “War” bone with a spindly finger, twirling the tortoise plastron around until forcibly striking it onto the bottom center row with more force than any of his previous moves. “How all things are gained and lost. War.”
Through the help of Lesser Vipassanā, Alistair began to understand more. Though he doubted it would have worked if River was being truly recalcitrant.
“Your civilization must have been grand beyond my wildest imagination,” Alistair said once it dawned on him. “Philosopher-kings who saw cultivation as a series of questions to be answered with rationality.”
Alistair placed his drachma in the center of the left column.
“You’re too cruel.” River placed the bone inscribed with “Civilization” in the bottom right. “Too cruel. I cannot even remember my own mother’s face or the eyes of my Dao Partner. All this has been stolen from me, yet you tease me so.”
“That was not my intention,” Alistair said softly. But he did not place his final drachma, despite the gold drachma appearing in his hand. “Let’s play again.”
River raised his spectral eyebrows in genuine surprise. “What is this subterfuge? Do you jest?”
“I dare not with an esteemed master.” Alistair smiled. “We’ll play differently this time.”
Alistair quickly explained the rules of ultimate tic-tac-toe, a game that he wasn’t super familiar with but had played with his sister as a kid. She crushed him all the time back then, but he wasn’t a kid anymore.
“One thing,” Alistair said. “If I win, you have to stop the rest of the ghosts from harming anyone for the rest of the wave.”
“This cannot be done,” River said, shaking his head. “The restrictions are too binding.”
“Better to die free than live as a slave,” Alistair said. “All things are impermanent. If you don’t want to play, then I have my priorities, which are to the people I have to protect.”
River stroked his beard, though the spark in his eyes told Alistair that he would not refuse. “You drive a hard bargain. Another game it is!”
The old man spirit conjured the nine boards for them to play with ease. As Alistair expected, his was the victory.
They played for several hours. River was an admirable opponent, putting up a solid fight, but Alistair had an advantage—Dev’rox. The imp was a master of games, including ultimate tic-tac-toe. It was unfair given that River had been reduced from whatever great being he was in his life to a husk used by the Sublimed Machine, but that was the only reason why Alistair went for this approach to begin with. If he actually thought the spirit was going to win, he wouldn’t have played.
Alistair placed his last stone on the board, securing the victory for his black pieces over River’s white. The battle over the nine grids was hard fought. Alistair wasn’t sure if he would have found the win on his own.
“Good game,” Alistair said, going for a handshake. River obliged, with ectoplasm meeting flesh and age meeting youth.
“Well played,” River said. “Well played. Thank you.”
His body began flickering. Shackles appeared around his wrists, ones that Alistair knew were always there, but invisible and undetectable to his Foundation eyes. Indecipherable maze-like hieroglyphs glowed on the manacles, brimming with power.
Cracks spread across the spirit’s body, starting from a decrepit soulcore that became visible for brief flickers.
“I had help,” Alistair admitted. “I’m sorry for sullying the game like that.”
“Nonsense.” River Flowing Towards An End shook his head with a mournful smile. “As long as the game was good, what does that matter? You gave me a taste of the good old days. For that, I am grateful. Your wish is granted. My old friends won’t bother your people anymore.”
“Can you tell me your name, at least?” Alistair asked. “Your real name, or the name of your civilization?”
“As all things will one day be, even that has been lost to time.”
The cracks consumed the ancient being from the inside out and the soul itself shattered into a million pieces. Dev’rox confirmed wordlessly Alistair’s assumption. It was a true souldeath. There was no coming back from that.
The five pieces of drachma Alistair used for his first game were still on the first board River conjured. The little makeshift board outlived its creator.
He used the tic-tac-toe board and the drachma to make a makeshift grave for River. A notification informed him that he reached level 61, an extremely fast turnaround from level 60. It made sense, since River was like the kaiju equivalent of the Mindaugust’s Trial, if not greater. But he was also more than that.
Alistair had a difficult time deciding what to write for an epitaph for someone he knew for only a scant few hours.
His final decision read, “Here lies a man once called River Flowing Towards An End. He saw the peaks and lived to tell the tale.”