Jay stepped into the darkness and emerged in another dimly lit cave. He heard a faint warp behind him, Jay turned and saw nothing but a perfectly smooth stone wall. It matched the other walls, as well as the ceiling and floor. They weren’t just bare, but completely spotless. Something about the place seemed off, Jay spent a few seconds wondering what before it clicked.

The cave was dimly lit, but there was no light source.

Jay wondered how it worked before a system screen in the storm sage’s familiar blue added to his confusion.

Catch the lightning. 24:00:00.

What lightning?

Jay tried to analyse the situation, what could the sage possibly mean by catch the lightning? Was he supposed to wait until a bolt came into the room and react quick enough? Did he have to create the lightning to catch? Jay really hoped the catching part wasn’t strictly literal.

He didn’t have working hands.

Jay sat down in the centre of the room, limp bandaged arms resting on the rocks beside crossed legs.

Catch the lightning huh. I’ve got to find it first.

The room sat perfectly still as Jay searched for the elusive lightning. He knew it wouldn’t be as simple as just looking. Knowing the sage, the “lightning” was probably a metaphor or something. Instead, Jay remained seated, opening his mind and extending his essence perception outwards. Jay remembered his meditation at the foot of the SunSpear’s statue. Had he been looking at his fledgeling core back then?

Jay discarded any thoughts of the past. If he was going to catch the lightning, he needed to concentrate all his focus right here and right now.

Jay's neck hairs sparked upright.

His eyes jolted open, looking for whatever just set him off.

Nothing.

The sensation faded as quickly as it appeared, leaving Jay swiping at shadows. He couldn’t make out much in the dim cave, but he was certain there was nothing in there but him. Even the air stood still. Jay closed his eyes and went back to searching for the lightning.

It happened again.

Every instinct told Jay to rip his eyes open. Told him to look for whatever was attacking him. He knew it wasn’t that simple. Jay kept his eyelids wired shut and tried to sense the lightning in the room.

Useless. Three more sparks came and went, vanishing before Jay could even identify them.

A few moments went by. He felt it again. For a fraction of a fraction of a second, everything in his body screamed danger. Fear coursed down Jay's spine. Pure instinct kicked Jay's eyes open as he frantically searched for anything around him. But nothing was there. Only Jay and the spotless stone walls, barely visible beneath the faint, sourceless light.

Jay looked down at his body, trying to ground himself against the fear. It kept coming. More intense now, and more frequent.

Beads of sweat rolled down Jay's forehead, the mental exhaustion taking its toll on his body. He took a deep breath, but the microsecond-long bursts of anxiety kept ripping him out of every moment of calm.

What the fuck is going on?

Jay tried to steady himself. He thought back to all his previous training, had he felt this before?

Wait…

Jay stood up and rushed towards the closest wall. Hugging it tight, using what little light was available to him, and meticulously inspecting it.

Something was interfering with his instincts. Something was scrambling his nervous system.

What if it was the lightning?

Jay trawled along the wall, pressing his face against the smooth stone and inspecting it for any kind of opening. Anything that seemed out of place. That was probably where the lightning was coming from. The bolts of fear didn’t stop striking him as he looked. They were growing stronger too. It wasn’t just fear anymore. Now each bolt cramped Jay’s body wherever it hit. Micro spasms in Jay's muscles made it hard to balance as he looked for openings in the wall.

After minutes of looking, damage slowly accumulating, Jay still couldn’t find the source of the lightning.

An invisible bolt shocked Jays left leg. His calf flung out wildly, swiping Jay's base from underneath him.

With no working arms, and almost no view of the ground beneath him. All Jay could do was tuck his head into his chest and spin his back to the floor.

Jay slammed into the ground. Pain clawed at his lower back and the relentless assault of invisible lightning didn’t stop either. Jay's vision blurred. Had he hit his head on the way down? He wasn’t sure if the blurring was real or just the lightning getting to his vision.

Once more Jay was pulled from his physical body.

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He was back in the training room. He was alone. It was the night he’d first grasped lightning essence, injecting it into his nervous system to overload his body. Shadow Akira was in his peripheral vision. Blurry; that wasn’t what he needed to focus on now.

He was staring right at a single mote of electricity across the training room. A single bolt trapped inside a bottle. When he first glanced at it, he didn’t even see the bolt. It was just a speck of energy inside the glass. The only evidence it even existed was the dim light it gave off. A sourceless emanation filling all corners of the bottle. Jay pushed Eye of the storm to its limits, trying to spot the lightning. He strained his brain, his eyes, every nerve in his body.

All just to get a glimpse of the bolt.

He still couldn’t.

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A spike of pain, the biggest one yet, yanked him back to the painful present. Why had he gone back to that memory? He was still no closer to finding the source of the lightning. What use was the bottle to him now?

Another spasm, this one not concentrated but encompassing Jay's whole right leg, made the final puzzle piece click in place.

He was inside the bottle.

No wonder he couldn’t see the rooms light source. No wonder he couldn’t see the lightning bolt. It simply wasn’t there.

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It was everywhere.

Just like inside the bottle, the rooms bolt of lightning was bouncing around the walls faster than Jay could perceive. Faster than Jay could even hope to perceive. But that still wasn’t the full picture. If it was moving so fast it was everywhere at once, was it still just a lightning bolt? What differentiated the lightning from the air in the room, from the stone walls, from Jay inside it?

Great. I’ve figured out where I am. Now how do I catch this stupid lightning if I can’t even fucking see it?

Another spasm carved down Jay’s spine, reminding him that he was on a time limit. For a moment, Jay wondered if the storm sage might pull him out of the room if he got too injured. He banished that thought as soon he realised what that would mean.

He was getting through this trial. Whatever it took.

Think Jay. Fucking think! You’ve been in tight spots before. You got out of them. Time to do it again!

Jay raked through his mind, half hoping he’d be pulled into a memory once more. Hoping there’d be another clue. Hoping there would be something he’d heard before, something Jules or Coach said, that could pull him out of this bind.

There wasn’t.

But that was exactly the clue Jay needed. Of course his coach hadn’t told him a way out of this situation. How could he? This situation wouldn’t exist on Earth, it physically couldn’t. He was trapped in an underwater cave, with a bolt of lightning attacking him every second. Why on Earth would Coach have prepared him for this?

Entombed in stone, Jay had to think outside the box he was stuck in.

But everything he’d been taught wasn’t suddenly useless. He just had to look at it differently.

“Catch the lightning” What the fuck does that even mean?

It obviously wasn’t literal. Jay had no working hands to catch anything with. And how do you catch something with no real physical form.

No that’s not it. Forget about catching it for now. I need to see it first. But how?

Jay knew he was getting closer. The muscle spasms had grown more intense and more frequent. His body wouldn’t stop shaking, but the lightning wasn’t affecting Jay's mind like it once did.

It had targeted his mind first. The microscopic shocks sent his brain haywire, triggering fear and anxiety with each attack. Then they grew. The lightning attacked him on a different scale, punishing his muscles with attacks too blunt to target his nerves.

But I’m not my body, I’m not even my mind.

What if I’m not Jay, but the essence of Jay?

Jay recalled Akira’s advice for finding his domain. He tried to drag himself out of his body once more. Consciously this time, and not into a memory.

Jay's convulsing limbs thrashed against the floor, but he no longer felt the slap of flesh on stone. He heard the echoing smack, but it bounced around the room before barely reaching Jay. He was fully alert, but his body felt like it was drifting asleep. It didn’t feel closed off like his bandaged arms, but distant. Like it was slowly floating away.

The piercing pain faded to a dull, distant ache. Jay looked down at his body. It felt… off.

Then it clicked. He wasn’t looking with his eyes.

Jay hovered over his body, a severed consciousness overlooking its old home. It felt different to the memories. He was still in the room, still present, just no longer tied to his physical body.

But if he wasn’t within his body, then where was he?

Wait…

Jay wasn’t tied to a physical form anymore; he was simply conscious. Floating and occupying space.

Jay could never make out the lightning’s physical form. Not when he looked in the bottle, not when he looked throughout the room.

What if it didn’t have one.

What if it had escaped the confines of physicality, just as he had. What if it wasn’t a point in space, but spread throughout space itself?

In order to adapt to fighting in the coliseum, Jay had to eradicate all preconceptions of what fighting was. In order to achieve Harmony, he had to eradicate all his preconceptions of what training was.

Now. In order to truly see the lightning, perhaps he had to eradicate all his preconceptions of what seeing was.

Jay extended his perception far beyond the limits of his body. Probing out like when he meditated by the SunSpear’s statue. Before, he’d felt the whispers of the SunSpear’s warmth, he’d felt the vibrance and serenity of Akira and Lyra. But this wasn’t simply feeling. It was more than exposing his neck and seeing what would bite. Now he wasn’t just probing, he wasn’t just looking.

He was searching. Hunting.

Jay steadily expanded his consciousness. Stretching towards each corner of the room.

He gazed down upon his spasming body, writhing like a fish out of water. Jay was aware of the pain. But he wasn’t beholden to it. He knew agony wreaked havoc on his body, punishing every cell it ran through. He was aware of the pain but kept expanding his consciousness further.

Because he was even more aware of the danger.

Jay's helpless body thrashed against the floor, a cut had opened above his left eyebrow and dripped crimson blood throughout the pristine stone chamber. It wasn’t enough to tiptoe out of his comfort zone when each second brought him closer to death.

He had to push further, and he had to push now.

Information plagued Jay's mind as his perception expanded. Each inch he stretched outward brought more variables into his head. More things to consider. More things that were now him.

Leaving his body had freed Jay from the lightning’s piercing strikes, but they were quickly replaced by suffocating spiritual agony.

Jay occupied the same space as the lightning now, and it hadn’t accepted him yet.

Jay stretched his very being, he crept closer and closer to the walls. At times, he almost forgot who he was. But he remembered his goal. The lightning bounced around the cave, glancing upon every speck of the room’s surface. So would he.

He expanded further. Fighting for control with the lightning, fighting for the right to exist.

At last, Jay hit the cave’s walls. His presence encompassing the stone prison completely. His will superimposed upon the lightning's. Locked in a constant equilibrium of struggle.

But why? He didn’t need to fight the lightning, he needed to understand it. Jay stopped struggling, he stopped fighting the lightning. Instead, he followed it. Jay was already spread across the room in a cloud of consciousness, everywhere the bolt flew was his domain.

Slowly, Jay began to understand the lightning. It wasn’t a bolt, darting around the room. Yet it wasn’t a cloud of consciousness, like he currently was. It was pure energy. Jay could have followed the bolt of energy for a thousand years and he still wouldn’t have unlocked all its secrets. But he didn’t need to do that. He knew exactly what he needed to do.

Catch the lightning.

Except it wasn’t lightning. Just like thunder wasn’t simply the ebb and flow of compression and expansion, but a part of the storm. No, the thing he had to catch wasn’t lightning. It was far less, yet paradoxically far more. It wasn’t merely the side product of a storm, the flashing light of expelled energy. No, it was far more fundamental. Far more primal. The essence of lightning, the essence of the storm, could vanish from the universe, yet this energy would remain clinging onto existence. One of the building blocks for existence itself.

Electricity.

Jay hadn’t just seen the lightning. Now that they occupied the same space he’d uncovered its true form. He’d accomplished step one, now he had to finish the job. Jay’s physical body flopped on the cave’s perfectly smooth floor. His hands weren’t catching anything, so that just left his mind.

He thought about how the storm sage embodied the storm. Encapsulating its pure might and authority.

Now it was his turn.

To catch the electricity, he needed to become electricity.

Jay started with speed. He wasn’t as fast as electricity; he couldn’t dart around the room faster than the eye could see. But speed was just as pivotal to him as it was to the mote of energy bouncing around the room right now.

What else?

Electricity wasn’t a physical thing. It couldn’t be tied down to one place, it wasn’t confined to one form.

Jay was, but did he have to be?

Jay was his body, writhing in agony on the floor. Yet he was also his mind, elevated in serene consciousness. But he was also neither. His essence wasn’t tied to either of those states of existence.

Jay began to comprehend the true essence of electricity. Darting around the room, yet also becoming the room. Reaching speeds so great that the laws of matter and space bent to its will. He couldn’t fully understand it yet, but he’d made the first step.

A wave of elation burst into the room. Jay’s body stopped spasming, it lay completely still other than the gentle pulse of his breathing. The electricity hadn’t stopped bouncing around the room; hadn’t stopped filling it. But it had stopped affecting Jay's body. Its essence no longer interfered with Jay's own.

Because now they were one and the same.

Jay looked down at his resting body. Regardless of his revelations on the essence of electricity, he still had a body to return to. He’d gotten a glimpse of formlessness, experienced electricity, but he still wanted to return home.

An excruciating headache smacked Jay's skull the instant he collapsed back into his body. A tsunami of pain engulfed Jay as physical sensations once more became part of his reality.

He didn’t care. He only felt relief. Uncontainable elation at finishing the first trial.

It didn’t seem like a day had passed though, had he finished early? Maybe the storm sage would get his poetry class after all. Jay didn’t care, bring it on.

Almost nothing could ruin his mood right now.

Congratulations on completing stage 1 of the trial by lightning. Do you wish to quit now, or continue onto stage 2? 23:37:21.

Almost nothing.