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And from there, it simply continued. I should not have been surprised at the ease with which I conquered my enemies.
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Many years later, as Matt looked back on the day in the Arena, it would remain in his memory as perhaps the most important day in his life, but also one of the strangest. The wisdom that came with age, experience and knowledge gave him a framework for understanding experiences that at the time was lived through a thick fog of bewilderment.
He had found a seat on the cold stone bench as close to the fighting as it was possible to get. A solid metal railing separated him from a drop of ten strides down to the arena floor, and he had sat down with his elbows on his knees, the crowd pressing in from all sides. His attention was split, and he took in both at the same time: inside him, his core which kept pulsing through its cycles of contractions and expansion. Outside; a cacophony of excited shouting, magic, screams, and metal. His head throbbed with relentless pressure as he tried to observe the tournament through a lens of confusion. His thoughts were sluggish and his vision blurred, as if the scene playing out around him was all a dream. What was happening inside his mind, inside his body, was much more real.
He saw the nine platforms arranged in a grid, with six or seven fighters milling around each one. Charlotte’s group was close to him, and he watched her sit down cross-legged in the sand, her back straight as she closed her eyes to prepare for her first fight. Terrence was on the next platform over, boasting as he walked between his opponents, pushing and jostling. He saw other people he recognised mixed in by the other platforms: Duncan standing broad shouldered with a long spear and a wooden shield as tall as most men; Birga without the formal robes she wore to council meetings, instead wearing a tightly wrapped leather armour that seemed to allow her flexibility of movement as she cycled through a short sword form; Arnold, one of the few other healers in the city beside Mia, standing to one side, obviously afraid and trying to make himself invisible.
At the same time, his core saturated his mind with energy that created a curtain of essence between his consciousness and the outside world. He saw the sphere slowly contract, pulling on all the essence in his body, reaching out beyond and pulling on essence in the space around him. He saw thin threads of magic vibrating in colour as intricate symbols coalesced around him, absorbed through his skin and fueling the burning cauldron of magic inside his core. Already immensely denser and richer in energy than it was only a few weeks ago, it drew in the rush of threads and folded them together into smaller and smaller symbols as the sphere contracted.
Slowly, slowly, it shrank; already less than half the size of what he was used to, and still it was shrinking. His muscles tensed as he waited for the core to reach the end of its cycle, and he clenched his teeth together when it suddenly stopped shrinking. A moment of peace, a second of precarious balance, and then a blindingly bright light exploded out from the sphere and washed over him in a fresh wave of pain. Every organ inside him was vibrating with agony as white-hot blades of sharp metal cut through his flesh. He saw the energy rush out of the core to explode outwards, becoming a cloud of tightly packed tendrils of symbols that surrounded him for several strides in each direction.
Inside that cloud, people were standing and jumping and cheering down towards the Arena floor.
How can they not see this? He was sitting in the centre of his own personal domain of pure magic. The layers of magic in the air were reminiscent of the space outside the Arena, where the magical symbols had surrounded the fighters in the crowd. Only this was an order of magnitude more dense, the symbols far smaller and more complex, the energy they contained on a different level. It was the difference between drawing a simple rune the size of a hand, and drawing a complex array of magic into the point of a needle. He shivered as he realised the sheer volume of magical energy that surrounded him, breathing slowly to calm himself down as the agony abated. What is happening to me? What is happening to my core?
Everywhere around him, people were cheering and shouting. He was the only one still seated, and he watched through a haze how Charlotte held an arm high in victory before she reached down to help her opponent back to his feet.
A scream drew his attention. Terrence was pounding a man in robes with the pommel of his sword, striking him in the sides and chest and arms. The other combatant was on the ground, desperately trying to crawl away as Terrence followed him with relentless strikes that hurt his opponent without ending the fight with a killing stroke, before finally shifting the grip on his sword and slashing down at his neck. A flash of magic stopped the sharp edge as it met flesh, and the man went limp. The two men who entered the platform to drag the man away scowled at a smirking Terrence before carrying the wounded man towards the exit to bring him back to consciousness. The bruises from those strikes will remain, though. They are below the threshold for the magical healing. He did that on purpose. To hurt.
Deep inside his being, the core had begun to pull in essence once again, and the surrounding space became a vortex of magic as his body pulled on every thread within reach to feed the insatiable sphere. The cloud of symbols in his immediate vicinity was pulled in first, and then it just continued. He saw streams of threads pulled all the way from the fighters in the arena, dragged out of them to be sucked into his shrinking core. Yet again, the sphere was denser than before. It practically vibrated with energy, and Matt shivered in expectation of the next explosion of pain.
The next hours continued in the same manner. As the fighters below fought for glory and victory, another battle was happening inside Matt. Again and again, the core contracted and exploded. Again and again, pain saturated his body and his consciousness. Each time, the core pulled on threads from further away, with Matt hunched over at the apex where thousands of threads converged from the entire city.
And at some point in the process, as his mind cleared between waves of agony, he recognised a strange new phenomenon in his body. Through a pain that was becoming a constant backdrop to existence, he found a centre of stillness and calm to observe the process happening inside his body. The pain was not, as he had first thought, a wave that suffused the entirety of his body. Even if it felt like every organ and limb was burning with pain, he saw how the pain was wrapped around tendrils of essence that shot like lightning out from his core to follow defined pathways through his body. Incredibly thin and delicate, like branches on a tree, that led from his core out into his body: into his head, into his spine, into his arms and his legs and into his stomach. Down to his pelvis, up to his throat, the network connected all the important organs of his body. The flashes of pain and essence travelled down these channels in the blink of an eye, pushing through something that was blocking the free flow of energy. Like pushing falling debris away from a road, the pulses of energy cleared the way through the pathways.
And with each pulse from his core, the channels expanded, allowing more and more energy to traverse the pathway.
His body thrummed with the latest wave of energy as his vision cleared through a haze of essence and tears, and he looked down towards the Arena. The surrounding cheers died down, and Matt blinked as he realised the fighting was over. He saw Glydia walk from fighter to fighter, tapping them on the shoulder and pointing them to one of two groups. Charlotte was standing in the group furthest away, together with the other fighters who had made it through today’s fighting, ready to join tomorrow’s knockout rounds.
Matt’s eyes opened wider when he saw Terrence, standing to the other side with his three henchmen. On the loser’s side. That makes little sense. He’s a fucking ass, but he can fight. And so can his friends. Matt wished he had paid better attention. How had that happened? And why is Terrence smiling?
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
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Matt’s vision was still blurred as he stumbled into his room. He couldn’t remember much from the walk back from the Arena, and was grateful to have made it to his bed. He flopped down on the soft mattress and briefly wondered if he should have called on Mia. Maybe she could have helped. He didn’t think anything was wrong with him. It had something to do with his core, with cultivation, but it would have been reassuring to have her nearby.
The next explosion of pain burst out from his core, and he finally let out a scream of pain he had been holding inside all day. No longer a pain that saturated his body, it was now clearly defined and confined to the thin channels in his body. A network of lightning pain. The pathways had grown wider with each pulse of energy. His temples throbbed with a dull and tired pain as he watched his core contract - again. He laid there, worn out and surrendering to the strangeness of his core, waiting for it to reach the tipping point where it exploded back out with energy.
Only this time, that did not happen. He had been waiting for a long time when he realised the core had shrunk beyond the point where he expected it to burst. It was just a tiny pebble, a fraction of where it had started this morning, but the energy that was coming off it… It was far beyond anything he had experienced before. More magic was packed into that pebble than he had ever felt inside his body. And the core was vibrating with eager, hungry energy.
This is new, was all he had time to think, before his attention was pulled inwards with a sudden jerk and his point of view rushed inwards towards the core. What… he thought, before a bright light flashed.
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Matt blinked against the sudden bright light. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing upright, his bed nowhere to be seen. The surface below his feet was so black that if not for the pressure he felt through the soles of his feet, he thought he might be floating in empty space. Above and all around him, a hemisphere of magic surrounded him. A dome that was crackling with energy as flashing patterns of coloured magic rippled across the darkness of the sky.
What is this? Where am I?
But he knew. Deep inside, there was an unmistakable feeling of familiarity. He had watched his core for weeks. It was part of him, and he was part of it. This was not a strange place. Somehow, his consciousness had found its way into the centre of his core.
There was something deeply familiar about the silence surrounding him, the quiet air. It was just him, and nothing else, in all directions. Slowly he turned around, looking for something to break the uniformity of the black surface he stood on, but there was nothing except the dome of magical symbols far in the distance.
Tentatively, he took a step, halfway expecting his foot to meet empty space as he set it down on the blackness and his foot met a solid surface. He took another step forward. Again, his foot soundlessly hit solid, unyielding ground, and he took another.
Where to go? Why am I here? Is there something I am supposed to do? A momentary pang of fear stopped him in his tracks. How do I get back out from here?
But the fear was quickly replaced by a strange intuitive knowledge that he had nothing to fear in this place. There was a calm to the emptiness, and he was reminded of a blank slate, a place not yet filled with life or purpose. A strange sensation filled him that this place belonged to him, that it was his to shape, to give meaning.
I don’t think walking in a random direction will serve a purpose. The core is part of me, created by the pattern. It made me a Cultivator. Matt remembered the three pillars of cultivation. Meditation, the Heavenly Forms and the Absorption of Essence.
Smiling and acting on instinct, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes. With another deep breath, and then another, he felt his mind calming as he centred his attention on the rhythmic cycle of inhalation and exhalation as he took a step forward into the first stance of First Form. This was the exercise he started each day with, and he fell deeper into calm satisfaction as his body moved through the familiar pattern.
It felt right, and he lost himself in the simple movements, letting his body take over and his mind relax.
His body moved faster and faster, hands snapping out in punching movements, drawing back to block and swipe aside imagined attacks. His feet were moving through the pattern, retreating, advancing, side stepping and swirling around on his heels to redirect his force in a new direction. Faster and faster, his brain stopped thinking and planning, maintaining a total focus on the way his body moved. Everything in the Universe was simply about getting from one movement to the next in a continuous flow of movements, a thread of motions that became a river where his mind was just along for the ride.
And where normally his exercise would be answered by pulses of approving energy from his core, filling him from the inside with quiet content. This time the world shook. The dome of magical patterns above flexed and rippled with energy that answered his call, making the world come alive with bright colours within the domain that was his, that was him. Outside that sphere he sensed a vast and unending blackness, a realm of pure empty potential. The void of the Universe.
The Heavens called to its newborn child. A Cultivator that was something new; something not seen before. A sliver of curious attention slid between layers of reality, tentatively touching the young man.
Matt’s back shivered in violent comprehension as mysteries older than space and time were peeled back like the layers of an onion. Between two moments of time, a glimmer of understanding became a flood of knowledge. And then it was gone, leaving behind only a dull afterimage of insight. A mountain reduced to a speck of sand; an ocean reduced to a tear. And it was enough to push Matt to his knees, overwhelmed and awed by the small shard of pure understanding that remained.
He, and his core, was a small bubble in the middle of an infinite void. A spinning ball of purpose in the centre of the nothingness of the Universe. Comprehension grew as he saw his own meaninglessness against the vastness of everything, understood the importance of what he represented: consciousness and structure, an observer to give meaning where there was none. The Universe was a blank canvas, his blank canvas, and his will was the paintbrush to give purpose to randomness. The Universe didn’t care for him, but the Universe needed him. Without him, and other people, other creatures conscious to observe creation, it would be without meaning. A never-ending existence without ever being given A Way. A direction, a path for the future.
The Universe was like him. It was born; it lived, and it died. And it was up to him–and other creatures, other people–to guide that journey. To be the journey. Nothing was a greater tragedy than a life without purpose.
A sudden tightness behind his eyes, and then relief, washed over his body. He let his movements slow as he reached the end of the Form, coming to a stop and realising that the pressure was gone. The sudden absence of pain that had filled his awareness for the past several hours almost made him miss the sensation of his body tingling with power. Almost.
“Congratulations,” a voice rang out through the darkness.
Floating on a cloud of calm, Matt kept his eyes closed for a moment, taking another deep breath, before he opened them.
Thirty strides ahead, a single candle shimmered from a simple desk made from an almost white wood. The desk was simple, but exquisitely made, every joint and angle perfect. Carved from existence itself, every scratch on its surface weighed down by intent. Behind the desk was a man. Wearing a simple, white robe, he had long white hair fastened in a topknot and a short, black beard. Deep furrows carved a story of a life lived with purpose, and each wrinkle spoke to Matt of choices made with pride. The silver grey eyes that looked out from heavy, bushy eyebrows carried an intent of mirth that drew Matt in.
In his hands, the man was holding what appeared to be a bundle of small, thin sticks. An empty chair was waiting on his side of the table.
“Welcome, Matt. I have waited a long time for you.”