I continued to try to force the two pieces together, but they refused to fit. Looking at all of the lines on the inside, I knew these two pieces had to go together and I started racking my brain for any changes that were happening this time around that were different from when I gained my first spell. Setting the two down on top of one of the handy order bricks, I tried to take a moment to focus my mind and calm my center, wondering if it might be my state of mind that was causing the disconnect. Before I could take a breath, I was instantly trying to snatch them back. It was to no avail as I saw the pieces start melting away and I could only look on in horror as the dust started disappearing into my core space in pieces too small for me to see.
Horrified that I might have destroyed my best chance I had of getting myself back into the fight, I took a breath and tried to calm myself before I moved on to the weakest core so at least my trip into here wouldn’t be a complete waste. But before I did I saw something that caught my attention soI picked up the Order brick that had melted the pieces down. Looking deep inside I saw that there seemed to be two wires in it now and they looked remarkably similar to the channels that made up the interior of the puzzle. So I started putting several more pieces on the brick and watched as they all started melting away, all the while leaving their channels imprinted on the brick. Eventually, I filled that brick up and it wouldn’t dissolve any of the pieces. But I still had five pieces of the puzzle left over so I started adding them to another brick until they had all dissolved as well. With nothing left to add to the bricks I started trying to combine the two so that I could finally get my healing spell, but they just didn’t want to join. Having formed a spell already, I knew there had to be a way to make it work but I just couldn’t figure it out. The only other force I had easy access to was the green energy…
Mentally snapping my fingers I remembered that had been what had glued the pieces together of my last spell. The kill energy was still streaming into me so I didn’t want to let down my defenses against it which meant I had to take the spell to it. Taking up the two bricks I had imprinted, I was forced to dodge one of the incoming blank ones that was on its way to add itself to the pile and took off through the empty mountain inside of me to see if I could fix what I broke.
Finding a vector the exp wasn’t taking to attack my soul, wasn’t that hard. Despite the greater amount of elites, they were still only goblins so the amount of exp I was taking in wasn’t even close to being needed to fill my core. All together I doubted my share of this exp could even equa what I had managed to take in from the troll. Happy that I had the barrier in place so I wasn’t having to deal with the pain and anger ripping into me anymore, I tried to send my astral body dipping into one of the ribbons that were circling my soul, defending it from the pain and anger that wanted to rip into me.
Whatever this stuff was, it wasn’t something I seemed to be able to interact with other than in the most general of terms. Somehow I had to be swirling it around to protect myself but I couldn’t seem to manipulate it more directly like I could the broken cores or Order bricks. I couldn’t tell if it was because I wasn’t focusing enough and hadn’t figured out the trick of it; or because it was just impossible for anything to move the liquid other than with the strange connection it had with the Chaos swirling through the center zone of my core.
Every time I tried to dive into the rivers, I felt something emanating from it that scared me. Something was telling me that this was a force that I didn’t want to mess with. I had the feeling that if I sent my conscience streaming into it I would be torn up and spat out just like the exp was being destroyed. Flying back a short ways I continued to ponder the problem, debating if I should just drop the bricks and escape back out into the world to see if there was anything I could contribute despite my crippled state. Unfortunately, the goblins didn’t seem to be the type to be distracted by my witty repartee.
Time seemed to be slowed down here, but it didn’t stop completely judging from the way the fodder I had missed had managed to get the jump on me and rip out parts of my hamstrings while I had been in here the first time. I decided to give myself a little more time to figure out the problem. I really needed to start using the exp funnels to start marking where enemies might be hiding. I had seen the multiples moving past me, but had just ignored it as I was ‘sure’ I had all of the enemies accounted for. Cursing my overconfident early self for a fool. Part of me just wanted to engage in a lengthy round of self-flagellation, but as refreshing as it might have been for my soul to have a pity party, that wouldn’t do anything to improve the situation for the rest of the group.
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After several more tries trying to approach and being repelled, I had one last idea that I thought would either go amazingly well or horribly wrong. My thought was just to throw the bricks into the current. Simple not something my micromanaging brain was at all happy with doing. Maybe they would get destroyed or maybe they would be flung out at high speed, but either possibility should be survivable for me, just one option would result in the loss of the healing spell that I desperately needed. Deciding that I needed it now and that it was worth the risk. I knew I needed to get a move on as the longer I stayed in here and debated things, the better the chance was that something would happen to the kids. Or another group of fodder I missed might decide to finish off the job the first ones started. So I decided to just go for it and sent the two bricks hurling out when an approaching ribbon rotated by.
As the Order dove into the ribbon of liquid power, I watched as that ribbon stopped it journey and sat frozen for a minute, before the rotating Chaos of the core managed to overpowered the nature of the fewer Order and sent it continuing to spiral around the central area, leaving the two bricks behind but now glowing and frozen in space. Sending my core self over to them I tried to bring the glowing bricks away but they were stuck there frozen in space, connected to nothing. It seemed I had just fixed one problem only to exchange it for another. The bricks were stacked on top of each other now and I couldn’t even see a line from where they had been fused together. Grabbing hold of the newly joined brick I found I wasn’t able to move it either, but I noticed I was starting to feel a growing connection to it.
After several tries, I quickly realized this wasn’t going to be a puzzle I could force. Leaning my mind into the breathing my body was doing, I tried slipping into the meditation while keeping myself in the core space next to the enlarged Order brick. Keeping an insubstantial finger on the bricks I focused on connecting to the meditation, letting my mind slowly clear until I almost lost focus entirely as a peace I had never known started to envelop me. I could almost smell the freshness of a field of blooming flowers after the rain had come. The vividness of it was so real it jolted me out for a second, almost sending me out of the core and back to my body.
But the Order seemed to have grounded me and I was able to hold on to the frozen bricks until I was able to regain that feeling of a gentle spring day. At first, I could continue to smell the freshness of the field and the intermingling of scents that the different flowers were sending out in their efforts to attract pollinators. But I had a small feeling that this wasn’t the feeling I needed to connect the spell too. As that started going away, I almost started gagging at the rotting smell that seemed to take over in its place. Worse than the vileness I had tasted when I had made myself hurl to shut off the troll’s regeneration, the smell of death had me wanting to vent my stomach. It took every part of my willpower not to release the brick and let myself go flying back out to my body.
The smell of death began slowly transforming into the smell of rotting, which was marginally better. So I managed to hold on and ride out through it until that in turn began to transition into a neutral smell. Unfortunately for me, it wasn’t actually a neutral that meant nothingness. This instead seemed to be a middle ground between the points of freshness and growth; to rotting and death.
As awful as those smells were I started getting a feeling that this was closer to where I needed to be. Feeling between the cycles a sense of belonging and resonance I started noticing all of the wires the puzzle pieces had left inside the two bricks start to vibrate in the resin like center that was the Order. It was almost like the green energy had moistened it the slightest bit and as I was coming closer to a core concept that was drawing the broken bits of the spells channels back together.
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But wasn’t healing about bringing everything closer, knitting wounds back together, and having the body grow back stronger? Why was I getting so much death and rot from the block?
I found myself pondering the concepts. If this was indeed a world governed by the concepts of Wuxing then the green cores represented wood energy which I had always associated with growth and healing. So it made sense that that was why the healing core was green and the might blow spell I had glued back together could be associated with a temporary growing of the muscles… no, damn it, Jack stay on target. What does death and decay have to do with healing?
Talking it over with the voices in my head that loved to play devil’s advocate. The obvious answer was that healing and life was the opposite of death. Life is always constantly fighting to hold the certain force off, but that also didn’t resonate with the spell.
This was all intuition, but I was feeling that the closer I came to connecting with the concept, the more the pieces resonated with it, and the closer the spell was to being healed. If that was the case then currently I was ice cold. Taking a breath and talking it over with my inner hamster; I began to question in what other ways death and decay have to do with healing; and I eventually had another thought.
What if you don’t think of it as a healing spell? After all, what is healing but the growing of new cells and having them reconnect with their fellows. So what if this isn’t a healing spell but instead what if I think of it as regrowth? Watching the tubes in the bricks start to quiver stronger I began to become more certain that I was on the right path. Continuing to throw out ideas some I followed along, while others were quickly rejected.
If you are regrowing part of your body then that means by the very definition parts of you must have died, there for you have to clear out the old stuff that died and rebuild.
No, that can’t be it, but there was something there! Nature doesn’t waste. Eventually whenever there is excess something will come along to the banquet and feast. That will in turn generate a new glut of waste which will in turn cause new organisms to form and mutate until they can consume the glut.
No, stop going down that path… you had something in the beginning, but then you started going off track.
What was it in the beginning that caused the resonance? Thinking back the blocks had been vibrating pretty hard when I was thinking about regrowth and death but when I started thinking about clearing out the excess it stopped.
What if instead of clearing it away you instead think about it like a closed cycle? Death and decay bring nutrients to the soil, which bring new growth sprouting forth. Some of the best ways to start a garden are with bone and blood in the bottom of the compost. I would assume if you added meat to it it would be even better, but I’ve never really tried it as it always seemed like a waste.
As I continued to grow closer to the truth the green energy that had infused the Order was looking for, I could almost feel the bricks begin quivering as if the tubes in it wanted to spring together on there own. Just as I started to have a breakthrough some of the Chaos I was ripping free from the exp came shooting by on its trip to my inner area that seemed to trap the excited particles.
As it passed by the Order, the opposite force was sucked into the blocks. Immediately it began to bounce around violently, banging it around like I remembered back in the hell ball. You would think that would have distracted me but if anything I felt even more energized and my brain started getting inundated with a storm of sensations that had me loosing my humanity for a moment until I forced myself to remember who I was. I felt like I was a tree after a storm tore off some of my branches. Eventually, the dead branches decay and the nutrients are reabsorbed back into the ground and given back to the tree which recycles it for later growth.
On a larger scale, I was a field. Plants sprang forth and grew to be consumed by animals whose waste grew to nourish the next cycle of plants as it continued on through the generations. Only ending when one species grew to dominance and choked its competition out. Then either it found something with which it could grow in partnership with or it died out only to be replaced later with something new that could consume its dead bones so that life was able to spring forth yet again.
As the cascade of ideas hit me, I found that I was pulling in more of the green energy which was finally reacting to the emotions and ideas that were flowing through me and mixing with the Order and Chaos. I saw more Order bricks flying up to join with the original two and more of the Chaos motes that were being harvested came flying into the growing spell instead of making their way to the inner core. But it seemed that I was light on Chaos. I could see the Chaos straining to get out from the inner area it was being held hostage in.
As if it felt it as well, the morphing blob my realization was becoming started pulling me towards the inner zone that had rejected me and held the Chaos prisoner. Faster and faster we went and I realized this was either going to cause a massive crash that might shake my soul to its very foundations or we were going to have an explosion.
In the end, neither of my conclusions ended up being true. Instead the spell and I passed through the zone going so fast everything became a blur. Stripping off some of the Chaos as we passed by, I can only imagine they were like magnets, only pulling the required amount in as we moved through the cloud that now formed the inner area. As we were on course for the black dot in the middle I expected the immanent collision to be violent and I braced my insubstantial body as best I could. But I had forgotten how hungry my soul had been for that energy. Thinking back to the first time, I remembered how hungrily it had acted whenever the energy had gotten close enough for my soul to get a whiff of it.
As I struggled to jump off the train when I saw that it wasn’t going to stop panic was shoved down as my mind when cold and I tried anything I could think of to halt the process, but it was to no avail. I was stuck and whatever this new adventure that was staring me in the face looked to be, it seemed like I was on the express train and we were charging full steam ahead. Sighing I accepted the inevitable as at last my soul consumed the energy it was so hungry for, sucking my ego and id along with it.
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Vastness was the only word that seemed appropriate as I begin to try and comprehend the size of the space that my ego and id were sucked into. It seemed like on this size of the dot my soul was the size of the entire universe. I could feel myself disappearing as tiny parts of me were broken down into smaller and smaller pieces. I watched while the individual bits of them were sent to the farthest corners of this immense space. A single thought or idea had the space of a galaxy to roam around in, alone with nothing to bother it. I felt myself disappearing into the emptiness. But eventually something started gathering the pieces of me back together. I found myself being pulled back to the Order and Chaos that had stuck together despite every effort this universe had made to rip the spell apart.
While it felt that there was some kind of conscious effort to collect all of the bits of me, the part of the universe that seemed to be trying to break apart the spell seemed to be operating on more of an autopilot. As the primal powers continued to gather up the fragments of my ego and id, I started again feeling the parts of the wood energy that I had been attuning to when the disaster had happened. Regrowth, life through death. Harvest and consumption so you have the energy to grow and build later.
As it continued to pull everything that was me back together, I felt myself being bathed in the green energy that had been pulled into the spell, and it was imparting its very understanding on the vastness that was my internal soul. As my understanding increased, I felt the hold on the Primal energy structure start to lessen, and I begin to notice as my id and ego started to wake up and realize they weren’t supposed to be on this side of the dimensional wall. Everything slowly started getting pushed out towards the real universe.
Now we were driving at another hole, this time a white one that shined with a brightness that would have been blinding had I brought my physical eyes along for the ride. Faster and faster we dove for the hole, but as the eternal part of my soul was still greedy for the impartment it continued to pull at the crystallization of Order and Chaos, causing it to rotate as it traveled through the vastness all the while continuing to harden while the realizations slowly started to solidify in my mind as well.
Diving through the hole, the spell was no longer flat like the skipping stone it had been when I had found it. Nor was it a globe like the better cores I had found. This was turning into a structure that resembled hollywood’s best special effects. It was a modern art version of roots spiraling into the soil like some kind of wooden drill or vines twisting and climbing up an invisible tree. Whatever this was it wasn’t some kind of basic healing spell anymore. As it went shooting through the hole like a kayak through the rapids, I realized that it was no wonder I had always been so hungry for that leftover green energy.
Someone on this world had found a way to harvest souls and turn them into a liquid version of the Dao.