Dan had successfully painted the universe around him. He could feel his mana moving inside himself and with each cycle, the colours around him deepened into richer and richer vistas. The blue shadow on the outside of existence flitted around but Dan did not feel the pressure on his soul again as he had done.

The blue was now sliced through with lines of red or black or purple. Orange burned through Dan perception and was washed away again with a soothing green before fading back into orange. It was beautiful.

He still felt like he was falling.

Yet he could feel something else now. Not something other, but as though he had another body that he wasn’t aware of. Somewhere, in that distant body, Dan could hear noises. It felt like the rumbling of titans and the universe around Dan shivered and rippled with the energy. He could not focus on the other, he had to focus on himself.

The work had been done. Dan hadn’t known why it was important until it was completed but now he could see it. Everywhere he could see, he recognised the colours. Recognised them more than just as sight but he recognised the orange as Hyun Soon. He saw the purple and remembered Po Daiyu. The black was Fa Lian’s mana.

Each segment of space was a different aspect of a person who had led to growth for Dan. Important people that he modelled his own mana off. They all made up a collection of memories, experiences and desires that Dan had taken into and upon himself.

Were they his memories or theirs? His experience or the experience of others? As the world around him bathed in the colours, Dan already knew the answer.

It was both.

He was not just the sum of himself but also the expectation placed on him by others.

The revelations came fast. Ah Dan did not act for himself when he could help it. When others were in need, he wanted to be the one to solve their problem. He liked the appreciation but there was a more personal reason. A flame inside that became soothed when helping others.

As Dan found inner truths, the jagged fragments of colour that had overwhelmed the all-encompassing blue shifted. They melded and joined, like pieces of a puzzle being slotted into place. Not entirely sure what he was doing, Dan pressed on. Both in his mind and physically, as he shoved his way through the half-liquid solidity that pressed down on him. He grasped the world around him as he clutched at the truths.

He wanted to help.

Like a cloth being pulled from a lantern, all of the colours intensified. The sounds that Dan could hear shook his universe once more, louder. Were people shouting? Did it matter right now, when he was so far away? Could he solve their problems? Dan thought that maybe he could.

He wanted to be the hero.

It was childish but even as he jokingly thought the words, the colours shivered again. They started to glow even as they merged, becoming new and more beautiful shades. The sensation of falling had slowed with each new understanding and he now found himself suspended.

It was okay to want to be the one who helped.

Cracks began to form as the colours all joined together. What they became, there wasn’t a word for the sight. It was all colours at once. A glittering jewelled fractal of light which shone like the most glorious star imaginable. Dan couldn’t stop himself from weeping as the sensation of falling turned in on itself.

He was soaring upwards now, ascending higher into the light that surrounded him like a cloak.

————————

Oblax Claré was the only person in the room who knew that he had nothing to do with the light show before them.

He was also one of the only people in the world who expected luck to work for him. Instead of panicking and reacting like the rest of the room, his natural reaction had been one of anticipated happiness. He clapped his hands together as the boy before him began to rise.

He would not share the sights that he could see while looking at Guan Ah Dan. The shift in the state of the boy’s core had not come from Oblax, not in the slightest. That fact made Oblax very disappointed. It had come from within and that fact had set alight a whole new series of burning questions.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Before the others could catch up to Oblax’s thoughts, he turned and smiled at the room, wiping fake concentration from his brow. Everyone in the room look joyous and grateful in equal measures as whatever Guan Ah Dan was doing continued. Everyone except one.

The girl with the glint in her eyes did not stop looking at Oblax.

————————————

The shell around Dan shattered into a thousand million pieces. Like jewelled rainfall, the universe around him imploded and buckled.

A barrier broken.

At first, Dan had thought that space around him was acting upon himself. That was a mistaken way of thinking. It was not everything acting upon Dan, it was Dan acting upon everything else.While he had at first been stunned, blinded by the experience, he had pushed past that now. He could now sense what he was doing.

He was not awake. He had known that for a while, even calling out to Kumiho who still had not appeared. As Kumiho had not answered, Dan was fairly sure that this was not a dream. This was something akin to a dream but not quite one.

If Dan had to guess, and he did, he would say that he was his own mana.

Which made a heavy handful of sense while also being the strangest thing Dan could imagine. As before, with the thought came the understanding of the truth behind the thought. The unassailable truth. Wherever this place existed, if it really did, Dan currently was

Which meant the universe, the colours, the falling… it was all Dan’s mana. The titans outside were simply others, moving around. The shadow and the pressure must have been people working upon him as they could. He was grateful for that, if they were helping him it meant that they had done enough to get away from the danger.

Now it was his turn to do it.

He turned everything he could see orange with a thought. A memory of laughing on the edge of the Sasin forest bubbled up in Dan’s memory and he floated along it. Himself, Hyun Soon and Xiaomei. The first friends Dan had ever made. A slice appeared in Dan’s vision and a cool blue began to seep through. Xiaomei and Hyun Soon.

Their presence acted as the anchor Dan needed. He had stopped rising or falling at this point, his momentum was bound to his own will. He needed the stability to focus. Hyun Soon and Xiaomei were the absolute definition of stability, as far as Dan was concerned. Heavy armour and rigid ribbons. They were perfect. With the calming memories of his friends, Dan could push further.

What did he need after stability? Power. The power to influence the world that he was now secure in.

————————

To some in the room, what Dan was doing was surprising. To Hyun Soon, it just made sense.

Each and every time Dan had met a problem, he had bent his mind and body around solving it and not just pushed past expectations, he had punched straight past them. Hyun Soon had no misconceptions about his ability to keep up with Dan for any amount of time.

As he watched the mana armour the two had spent sleepless nights perfecting fall into place around Dan, he knew that he was okay with that.

Seeing his own technique being used to do… whatever it was Dan was doing? That was more than enough for Hyun Soon.

———————

How long had he been focusing on this? Weeks? Seconds? It was hard to tell. Without a true sense of self, there was also no true sense of time. There was this moment, and then the next, and it had taken him more effort than before to find the next step.

Dan’s idea of power did not come from one source, like his idea of stability. He had seen too many versions of strength. The colours of the world - his world - changed. The blue and orange formed a background layer to the new swirl of chaos that was forming.

What was power?

Was it Shade? The world turned grey. Was it Fa Lian? The grey darkened to black. Po Daiyu or her father? Veins of purple and red lit up the world like cuts on an arm, filled with magma. There were others, too. Ones that Dan had become familiar with and many more he hadn’t. Kumiho the fox, whose power Dan had no way of measuring or inspecting. The mighty dragon Ryong Aang and the strength which now sat in Fa Lian’s grasp.

All of those things felt like answers. None of them felt like the answer.

There was a sense of stagnation in the world. The colours started to become muted as Dan swirled the ideas in his mind. The thought pattern became a literal pattern before him, all crimson and mauve on a black background, like blood and bruises. This was not the correct answer.

But it would work for now.

Dan pressed against the dark inner layer, the scratched and ragged imagining of power as Dan knew it. It was enough. The space constricted around Dan. His mana tightened around him. The feeling was… not unpleasant but he would prefer to move onto the next stage.

Somehow, Dan knew there would be a next stage to this.

———————

This was definitely the end of Guan Ah Dan.

Shade would regret the steps leading up to this but there was nothing he could do now. Everyone had been forced out of the room as arcs of energy, screaming tendrils of power, launched their way from Ah Dan’s half-floating, armoured form. He looked like a nightmare. A cosmos of powers crashing into each other, rolling over and over again.

Shade thought it was beautiful, but he made everyone leave all the same.

Once the noises stopped, he would return and hope to see Ah Dan.

He expected to see a smouldering pile of ash.

———————

The next stage, it seemed, was pain.

A crystal clear clarity forcing pain. The type that made you think of nothing else but the agony, where it came from and how to stop it.

Dan was doing just that but having frantic thoughts was working against him. There was no shift in colour to the world now because there was no world. Just electrifying, caustic energy coursing through him, over him, on top of him.

Pain was Bloom. Pain was Void and Mania and Ravage. Pain was Steel Fever.

Pain was there to be defeated.

With that final thought, the grip around Dan, his mana and his consciousness disappeared. He awoke in the room which had been his cell for a short while. The Barracks. He tried to stand and find out what was going on.

Without fail, every nerve in Dan’s body shrieked in agony and he could not even shout out in pain as all the breath was stolen from him. He decided to stay down.

For some reason, Dan thought his injuries would be healed.