There once was a girl who drank from The Fountain,

She left her youth halfway up The Mountain.

She went back to get it but Someone was there,

They had her captured and she would despair.

They paraded her around with jewels and plumes,

But they were a sect with powerful runes.

She went to The ‘Chemist to make her malade,

But he was fanatic and made her a God.

Alina read the stone slate infront of her in disbelief. What did it even mean? Was it a prophecy? Instructions? A warning? Did she need to play out these events or avoid them?

She looked around, a little disoriented. She knew where she was, of course. Her Tribulation. This one, it would seem, was a dream-like vision. After passing out in the clearing with Jaki, she woke up here, in this world that seemed… muddled. Foggy. In front of her was a massive stone, easily thrice her height, and very roughly teardrop shaped. The message, whatever it meant, was carved out in the stone and the first thing she noticed upon waking up. Directly underneath the message, carved into the stone, was a fountain modeled after some kind of snake-dragon-think. It had a mustache, which she found very strange. Water poured out of its mouth in a steady stream, being caught in a bowl beneath it.

Around her was a forest of some kind. She didn’t recognize the plant, though it was some kind of very thin tree with green, instead of brown, trunks. Fog and mist interwove the plants, giving her a sense of unease, like walking out into the forest would cause her to get lost.

The only other thing of note was the mountain. The mountain curiously devoid of fog. With a bunch of buildings, a compound of some sort, at the peak.

Yeah, no. She would not be drinking from that fountain. Or walking up that mountain. That meant being captured by someone, a sect, apparently, and she was not for that happening. Weird cultivator-vision or not.

What if she just… waited?

…

…

…

No, that was boring. She had absolutely no sense of how time was passing. It could have been a minute or ten hours for all she knew. Waiting forever wasn’t an option. She even tried meditating, but quickly gave up. There was no point if it didn’t actually progress her cultivation, and again, she had absolutely no idea how long she spent doing it.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

The forest…? No, again. That definitely filled her with a sense of unease.

Well, the only place to go was the mountain, after all. But maybe if she ignored the fountain, did not drink from it, then things would play out differently?

So she set out, hiking up the mountain. Surprisingly, it didn’t really tire her. And with her sense of time being what it was, she couldn’t tell if she had spent hours or days or even just minutes walking however far up she was…

The issue was, her body was obviously aging.

As she hiked, she grew taller, her body filled out more into that of an adult. It stayed like this for a while, until eventually she began to shrink a little bit, and her back began to hunch over. Her hands were wrinkly, flabs of skin dangled on her arms, and she had big sun spots in places on her skin.

Walking back down the mountain had the process go in reverse.

The worrying part was, didn’t this seem like the second verse of that weird stone-slate-message-prophecy? If she walked further down, would she meet someone? What would they do since she hadn’t drunk from the fountain first?

No, she’d continue upwards. She’d once heard before that Cultivation meant defying the Will of the Heavens. If this Tribulation, the message on the slate, was from the Heavens, then she was certain defying it was the correct thing to do.

Plus, she really, really, really did not want to be captured and imprisoned. Screw that part of the prophecy.

So she continued hiking up and up, getting older and more feeble. It was a strange and foreign feeling to her, but luckily it didn’t actually hurt all that much. Probably for the same reason she wasn’t getting tired. This was a dream, or something similar. Her actual body wasn’t here.

Three quarters of the way up the mountain, she was getting pissed. She could barely walk at this point, so she ended up grabbing a nearby stick and using it as a makeshift cane, but her hands were so shaky she kept dropping it. It would take minutes to slowly crouch down, pick it up, get back up, and continue hobbling forwards.

An hour later, or a century later, she wasn’t really sure, she made it to the gates of the sect.

They were closed.

So she sat down, her back against the gates, and sighed, soundlessly.

Oh yeah, she hadn’t been able to speak at all in here. No sound would come out of her mouth, and any sounds she did make, like kicking rocks down the mountain, were extremely muffled, sounding very far away.

For the first time, she looked out on the landscape from the top of the mountain. There was no Ring. The Twin Suns weren’t in the sky, either. She’s not sure where the daylight came from, but during her entire trek up the mountain it had never turned night.

And then she saw IT.

IT looked like a giant water wheel, like the kind the sawmill back in the village had. At first, she thought it was the size of her village, but as it moved closer it seemed more like the size of the mountain. And then it got closer, and her mind couldn’t even comprehend it. It was probably larger than the Ring itself.

And she understood. She’d seen this thing before. She’d seen it before she was born, and she’d see it again when she eventually died. She saw it before she was born in her first life, and she saw it when she died in her first life. He saw it after he did his first Ascension Reincarnation, and he saw it before and after every life he/she had ever lived. They all had. They all would. Everyone has. Everyone will. We just don’t know about it when we are alive.

The Ring was contained in the Wheel, on one of its’ infinite paddles. So, other worlds too, were contained. Every being, every life, every cultivator, every mortal, every god. The Wheel was above it all. Always have been, always will be.

It terrified her. It horrified her. Words break down and cannot express at the levels of fear she felt. It wasn’t primal, it wasn’t spiritual, it wasn’t even in her soul. It was fear in a place she never even knew existed.

And then it was gone, and Alina Blake woke up from her first Tribulation.