---The first horror and the first calamity---
The first horror to release from the double-edged sword that is the sea of refinement was not a true calamity. Its well documented as the horrors friends revealed what happened after the fact.
Someone came to the sea slipping into the mist with a single plan. They wanted to purposefully default. They never planned on withstanding the trial.
They asked the spirit within to take their cowardness. “Remove my weakness. My fear, my bad traits. The pain from my girlfriend dying. My nerves. My…”
This is paraphrased of course. No one but the spirit knows exactly what was removed, the above recreation is taken from some drunken words he had spoken the day before.
As soon as those “weaknesses” were removed, the man presumably refined his strength instead, ignoring the first removal and with a new idea of what strength might be.
At least that is what we believe happened – as soon as the creature emerged from the mist it attacked. Its humanity gone. Its form distorted.
The creature who emerged had no fear for its life. No hesitation as it ripped into someone’s skull and swung claws of void through one of its previous friends.
Five died.
Five original earthlings with all their cultivated strength died to the ferocity of this first man turned horror. Still the horror was put down in the end – Relatively quickly all things considered. It had no fear for its life and little self preservation. If that was the only danger the trial left by the demon lord would be forgiven. A single surprise attack that hadn’t reached very far…
But then the first calamity hit.
The wrath king.
A blurry figure invisible to most sights. Grey and black to most, this figure stalked the planet for days upon ruthless days. They moved completely silently and killed with a touch. Their very presence brought fear and irrational terror – like the first horrors fear and cowardness had bonded into something with endless hate for the living. One of the only victims who survived the touch of death was a paladin who claimed to have over 100 necrotic defense spread across their body.
They survived as the monster had thought they killed him in the initial strike. If it had stuck around he would have fallen just as easily.
This revealed the first truth. Monsters didn’t need to play by the rules. Every monster we had faced up till now was…beatable. Mindless you might say.
The first calamity was cunning. It evaded all of the most powerful of seers and struck without mercy. It moved through dreams and struck as a nightmare.
It aimed for infrastructure.
It aimed for weakness.
It killed humans in their sleep – rather than a fair fight in a well understood danger, the way it slipped past everything and struck with way too much power…and if it sensed danger it escaped, running away to kill more. Cowardly. It was an example of “unfairness” the likes of which many had not experienced since the old world.
Its estimated hundreds died in that week. Finally, with a suspicious lack of fanfare, the slaughter simply stopped.
Had someone beat the wrath? Had the wrath gotten its full of violence and moved on? If someone had beaten it – who? And why hadn’t they come forward to claim the fame from it?
The sea of refinement was deemed too dangerous a wonder to attempt. Several groups took the time to cordon off the area. Working together to protect the world from anyone selfish enough to attempt it.
In the days to come the trial would only get worse.
---Day 5---
“Stop being childish” Jess snapped at Richard for the tenth time that day. The remains of his failed prank surrounded them.
“Violence is childish. Kids love gore. They talk about how much they want to see a real dead body. About how they've played about the ‘Googles’ and found videos of people blowing their heads full of holes with a shotgun or fucking guillotining themselves with dental floss.
“Profanity is childish. Only those darned kids have such foul mouths. No really. Adults never swear they are much too mature for that.
“Sex is childish. You ever see an adult draw an obscene reference to some phallic body part or talk about how much they want to fuck people? Horny teenagers. Degenerates the lot of them. Adults occasionally partake in the cloitus but always for procreation and under the light of the lord or some equally fanciful bullshit.” Richard waved his hands aggressively at their newest argument. A continuation of the previous arguments rehashing several of the main points.
“You know what's actually fucking adult? Trauma. Depressing shit. Loss. That'll adult you right the fuck up – Oh does that make you uncomfortable? Good!” Richard was more heated then normal.
“Excessive profanity isn't clever; it just displays a limited vocabulary.” Troy sat down beside Jess in support.
“Are you really calling me linguistically deficient? Just because you were raised with some Victorian-era puritan thoughts on language?” Richard asked turning to Troy. “The word you are looking for is ‘ad hominem’ sweetie. Roughly translated it means you are a cunt who just admitted I’m right.”
There was silence for moment before Jess finally responded.
“I think…responsibility is what makes an adult. Once you become a parent and have to look after a kid, you’ll realize you can’t act like this.” Jess nodded slightly as she finished gesturing to the giant stone penis.
“Oh, spreading your legs makes you an adult? Do you know how many fucking 16-year-old ‘parents’ there were at my highschool? They aren’t what I would call ‘mature’.
“Having a little snot covered post sperm is the bar you are making for adulthood – really?
“Admit it, Kids suck. They literally ruin your life. You can’t do anything fun anymore. I’m never fucking having one and don’t you think for one second one would appreciate having me as a father.” Richard yelled that last line and stormed away.
Moments later they could hear him loudly complain to James – loud enough they could still hear him.
“So, to recap in case you didn’t hear her newest shit. I have to become an adult. To become an adult, I have to go through some depressing trauma bullshit and then go through the rest of my life repressing and treating that trauma as a fact of life. I have to knock some bitch up and become a slave to her offspring.
“Or…hear me out okay.
“I’m never fucking growing up? If that’s the bar for maturity I’m staying as far the fuck away from it as I can. I’ve seen what being an adult is like. It fucking sucks!”
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---James---
James’s refinements were… thorough. He started with his arms, then moved to his legs. He popped off both feet at the same time and did a second – harder – refinement with them. That specific crawl across the sea floor was especially bad. Even worse than the one-legged attempts somehow – probably because it was technically the second time he was refining them? Definitely not worth double passes even if James could now survive terminal velocity without his power.
He refined his ears. His nose. His mouth and stomach. James even refined his eyes – one at a time. Not worth loosing them by accident if he did them both. Probably his smartest choice.
He moved on to his reaction speed and precognitive sense. His mana veins and kiln trait.
You would think repeated refinements would get easier. You’d grow numb to it. Instead, it was almost like the wonder ramped up. It pushed you to the brink each time adapting its punishment.
Even though James was trying to be thorough and refine his entire body bit by bit…a minor problem was becoming more and more obvious. There were gaps everywhere – lines of weakness between sections. Areas he hadn’t covered.
James realized he was being a bit too literal at that point and made a final body refinement. “Refine joints, weak spots, places I’ve missed but can deal without for the refinement session”.
That was the first truly conceptual request he made – and it was another particularly hard pass. A vast swath of his body just…refused to work. Even if it hadn’t been popped off like his body parts had been up till now…they still were taken from him for the attempt. Up till now mana had barely helped – and suddenly for this refinement mana was the only way he could move some parts of his body. James had to burn his domain at maximum power just to move each limb and crawl across the sea floor.
Still, even if it was a weaker refinement it brought everything he had done together with a powerful glue.
Finally James was ready.
He asked the sign to remove his domain and then – feeling surprisingly weak despite how much of his body had been refined – he did his ‘final’ refinement.
As if it knew how much this one meant to him, the trial ramped up yet again. Maybe his 20 minute wait time had been too long – but James had been near positive he could handle it. In this final attempt, the weight of the water kept him on all fours the majority of the way. The stinging sea stripped the skin from his hands and shins – causing each crawl to be painfully raw. The light blinded him through his closed eyelids and a roar of waves seemed to fill his ears.
He came up for air three separate times – each feeling nearly impossible.
Finally he was done.
James lay there on the beach feeling mentally exhausted as the repeated torturous refinements were complete. He stared down at the cloak the sign had turned his domain into and nearly broke.
Should he default? The worst that could happen is the sign would never help him again, right?
James lay in the sand for hours just trying to recover. Finally, he made his way over to the sign and accepted the tax.
He would pay his dues. No matter how much it felt like his effort was being exploited, this was different from working a dead-end job. This was a chance.
He felt his domain settle around him once again. It was comforting – like having his skin returned to him after the flogging it had received.
Done.
With a clench of an invisible muscle, James popped his domain activation and lay down to float above the sand.
An hour passed. Then two. He was out of food and water. There was an annoying camp outside of the dungeon – he would need to burst out of containment to get away with his gains.
Over three hours passed before James began feeling the strain. From 5 minutes to three hours.
James tried not to imagine what it would be like without the tax.
After his needed test James slept once again. He awoke even hungrier than before, but he was ready – and most of the exhaustion was gone.
Finally, after days of refinement, James left. He left the sea of refinement as the strongest human in the world.
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---Maddy---
Maddy did not have that many true refinements in her. Her sound concept was the biggest gamble and had barely been possible. Ideally, she would refine all of her concepts one by one…
But she just didn’t have the willpower to do that. She didn’t feel like that was weak – it invalidated just how hard dealing with her entire body melting was.
Maddy was not afraid of pain but if at all possible she’d remove it. The fact that the sea forced it upon her…it sapped her willpower more than any other problem it threw at her.
Anyways. After sound, the next obvious refinement was her eyes. Ideally, she would refine each eye one at a time…but the memory of that pain flared up every time she imagined that. Maybe it was weak of her, but she only felt like it was worth it for her triple affinity eyes.
And even that…well it had problems. If failing to retrieve her sound concept would have been devastating, failing to retrieve any of her eyes would be…she didn’t even know how badly that would go over.
Still if others used this and she didn’t she would fall behind and Maddison did not want to land near the bottom.
Refining her eyes was weird.
You couldn’t refine your “self”.
Not everything. Not all at once – Not directly at least – the idea was that “she” had to retrieve whatever she had “gambled away”.
The eyes were her. It was the same as jumping in the water and then jumping out. If her eyes could return to shore on their own, they could not refine.
You could refine entire portions of the self however…and as much as her eyes were separate portions they were definitely ‘parts’ of her, not separate creatures.
The way Maddy got it to work without dealing with the sign was simple. The eye she refined had to be trapped.
Delineated on all sides. Boxed in and weakened. It had to be so thoroughly isolated Maddy wasn’t even sure it could revive if it died in this case. Then and only then did the ritual work.
Then and only then could she toss it in the water and have it begin to refine instead of just burn and send back the pain of burning to the network.
She refined all Eight of her triple eyes near the shore. They each went 2-3 meters into the water and were given 4-5 minutes to refine.
As each eye refined, they lost consciousness. None had memories of the refinement themselves, simply a peaceful blank stretch of time where her main body struggled. Her main body struggled and shared the burden – each eye no matter where they were in the world writhed as she tried to balance the burden among them.
Finally, after a more masochistic trial than any other she had faced, she was done. Each eye had…grown somewhat – doubling in size as a side effect. Their separate stats had strengthened and melded together in a strangely solid block – their portions of Maddy’s mind had each grown.
From a life perspective they had more ‘life’ than any of her other eyes. From a creation perspective they had more ‘reality’. From a light perspective they shone brighter and contained deeper darknesses.
More than anything else they all…sort of melded their separate truths. They sort of…grew what Maddy would call their combination mana into a single cohesive whole.
Instead of Life + Creation + Light combined into one... The new eye had a mana type she would say was something closer to ‘the Light of Creation brings Life’? Life + Creation + Dark on the other hand felt more like ‘All Life is Created in the Dark’?
Each eye had their own truth that made more or less sense to themselves and others – some outright contradicting each other. It was all a teeny tiny ‘wibbly wobbly’ with how perception based it was – only obvious to Maddy because of the different conflicting perspectives. Life could be created in places other than the dark after all.
The portion of Maddy’s mind in each eye each came to their own conclusion. They wanted to refine something themselves. They wanted to prove they were each a key part of her – and then with some discussion found a final series of refinements.
You could refine anything – and while Maddy had focused on stuff she couldn’t do herself…her eyes focused on boosting what they could do past what she had done.
The first two eyes started with perhaps one of the most important spells she had made.
Dark-Creation-Life and Dark-Creation-Death attempted to gather up their permanent respawn soul work.
They started with perhaps one of the most important spells she had made and…weakened it by poking holes in what they had created…and then strengthened it by attaching shapes of what they hoped it might become. All Life is Created in the Dark focused on how a body could be grown from nothing and focused on how the spell itself was a thing of darkness that could be grown.
The Death of Darkness breeds Creation on the other hand? She focused on the burst of death energy created when anything ‘died’ – how it was purer in quality than simple death mana…close to death mana with some ‘reality’ and the concepts of whatever died in it – but also wholly different in that annoyingly confusing manner. Maddy focused on using that energy to protect the concepts and create the seed of a new her. She focused on capture and filtration – ripping apart the death energy to help strain out every bit of “Maddy Reality” tied into it.
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Unlike before, these two eyes puppeted Maddy’s body alone. They ignored the rest of the network and forced themselves through a single trial together – imagining themselves hand in hand as they marched into hell. The rest of Maddy watched and waited anxiously for the pair to return – gifting mana when requested but otherwise allowing them to face it alone.
The second pair was Light+Creation+Life and Light-Destruction-Life. They focused on themselves in a way – their goal was to improve the eyes primary means of movement.
There was no way to straight up replace the movement – not with how deeply it was embedded into them…but the pair had a plan for improvement.
Currently Maddy’s eyes sundered themselves in one position with destructive mana – reducing themselves to information and power. They then pushed themselves along a wave of sound – aiming in the direction they wanted to go with a note for how long they wanted to travel. Finally, they reformed a new body with creation mana using the power and reality of their previous form in this new spot.
Maddy had blended quite a few extra concepts into this ‘pick myself up, jump in that direction, drop myself down’ style of destruction/creation teleportation and it worked surprisingly well. First few times had led to a lot of her reality not surviving the journey…but after most of the parts that couldn’t survive had been burned away, her eyes had grown more and more efficient at jumping.
Even if she hadn’t fully understood what she was doing at the time, it was still a solid spell and one that had grown quite a bit with her embedding deep within her soul. Trying to do more at the start would probably have led to the spell not working. Trying to add to it now without anything extra would probably lead to the spell getting worse.
Trying to add to it and then refining the result? That was a potential power boost these two were willing to throw themselves into.
One simple problem with the spell was…well one she hadn’t even realized would be a problem when she made it.
Sound. Her eyes moved at the speed of sound. Something incredibly fast – something she thought would be fast enough and something that had the strongest concept with ties to communication and movement.
Something she’d only just recently realized was slow in comparison to whatever the physical versions of mages were called. James could break the sound barrier easily – and well. As everything she faced grew stronger and faster, sound just started to lag behind.
It hadn’t been too much of a problem yet, but part of being a mage was preparation and addressing problems before they actually happened. She couldn’t do this sort of improvement in the middle of a battle or anything.
Another minor improvement she wanted to add if she were already working in the area was to try and piggyback off the eye network. Currently her eyes could use spells to travel to each other, but the ability to teleport between eyes was not tied into this base spell. Tying it and her ability to push her body about into the same spell just felt like consolidation.
To start, the two light eyes focused on their shared element. Light.
Beautiful Beautiful Light.
Light travels faster than sound – faster than anything else natural. The goal wasn’t to replace – no it was to phase sound into light. Both were a wave after all, and polarity had something to do with direction… Well that was the idea at least. She just had to change the polarity of light into sound. Conceptually it made sense.
‘Destroy Life into Light’ focused on producing ‘Light sounds’ from other things, while ‘The Light of Creation brings Life’ tried to listen to the life in those same sounds.
Together they slowly created a framework for converting any sound spell into a light spell and confirmed the way different sounds created different colours and conveyed information in different ways.
Finally they were ready for their turn on the body. Maddy dangerously extracted her eyes mobility and smashed it it to pieces she could glue into a new form. She bound her new framework tightly around those pieces and then headed out, head held high. As she stepped into the water several spells flickered on, each attempting to block various negative effects of the water.
The third pair…they were the pair of war. Dark-Destruction-Death and Light-Destruction-Death. They focused on one aspect of Maddy. Her damage. Her lagging damage – how most she attacked recently resisted her spells passively. As a pair these eyes were…more straightforward than other Maddy’s. All her eyes were affected in part by the vision magic they each ran constantly and with a double helping of destruction and death, these eyes had a more pessimistic and cynical outlook than the rest of her.
They were sure no matter what they would do there would be some who could block them. Instead of naively trying to just increase their strength, they wanted a path for improvement.
The problem was their affinities. Life was the mana with the most conceptual growth focused into it – neither of them had a way to grow directly.
Instead, the pair focused on growth through death. Growth through adversity – through external influence instead of internal.
When anything was ripped apart by the void, a large amount of energy and reality was revealed. When anything was killed, a burst of death energy was created with all sorts of useful concepts.
Some of Maddy’s strongest attacks had taken advantage of that – replacing death mana with death energy or fueling themselves by consuming matter.
Maddy wanted to set up a permanent dynamo instead of recreating it every time.
The pair tested a variety of Maddy’s existing magic then turned and made their own spell. An orb of pure damaging darkness wrapped in a thin barrier of light. An orb of cruel radiating light bouncing around inside a wrap of darkness. The two wraps were bound to the inside of the opposing orb and thus blended together in a conceptually recursive manner – hopefully that was enough of an infinite ideal the spell could hold an infinite amount of resources.
The light attempted to hide the spell’s anchor through an illusion. The dark attempted to hide it with the hidden concepts contained in the affinity of darkness. They both attempted to destroy any attempt to connect to or find the anchor through as many methods as the pair could think of – mostly reversed concepts and shapes to destroy connections instead of what was connecting.
The two then bound the pair of ethereal orbs tightly, focusing on both binding and transference concepts – the idea was this spell would link to any spell she cast, empowering it and then reaping the resources from anything she killed or destroyed. Those resources would be split and filtered between the two orbs and two shells in as optimal a way as she could manage – hopefully conflicting resources would split into separate tanks so they wouldn’t interfere with each other.
There was something deeper. The goal for this spell…was for something tightly bound to Maddy. The pair of triple eyes were so committed to this ideal they convinced another to sacrifice. Death-Destruction. Her double eye with a similar focus would blend into this spell – she sacrificed her eye doing the equivalent of “teleporting without a direction” and then shoved her personal reality into this spell to make it permanent.
Finally, the pair tossed their ethereal orb into the sea and set to work retrieving the refined result.
This was the closest attempt Maddy had to actual failure. Both her pessimistic eyes nearly quit multiple times as their hope of being successful was as low as possible and they kept trying to cut their losses. They also…failed to account for how ethereal their spell was – as the orbs were nothing more than light and darkness without matter. When they found it, the burning pair struggled to grab and carry the spell – melting hands passing through the ethereal speck in failure.
Eventually they made a decision and abandoned their body – eyes merging with their spell and teleporting back through the water with great personal difficulty. They managed to retrieve Maddy’s skeleton from the sea…but only because of their previous sisters improved teleportation schema.
All that was left was an odd pair. Dark-Destruction-Life and Light-Creation-Death were two of the most opposing eyes Maddy had. Unlike the others, these two had no shared components…and no shared ideals beyond being part of the same person with the same goals for personal strength and health.
While the other pairs worked nearly simultaneously and refined themselves one after another, this pair brought up ideas and shot them down as they tried to prioritize. Finally, they settled on two projects – each picking what they imagined was the most important thing and helping their sister complete their own personal project on the side.
Destructive Dark Life wanted to take control of and improve her base potential for growth. She had a pretty simple basis. All spells grew stronger when you cast them multiple times – a lot of magical aspects improved through use. A lot of those improvements tapered off after awhile – there were early gains through reusing a spell multiple times through the same object but then after a point it was only really novel applications or incredibly powerful casts that did anything.
She imagined it was a bit like a muscle – you built up strength through working out, but after a certain point that strength hit a cap and no longer increased. She wanted to remove that cap or at the very least push it much higher.
Basing everything on this idea of muscles, Destructive Dark-Life built a mental framework that assumed every cast of magic destroyed the darkness inside spells and then healed back its strength.
More shape than spell, her framework was flimsy – you couldn’t just believe and change reality without a solid push…but hopefully when refined it would bridge the gap.
On the other side, Creative Death light – who’s illusion reality was especially strong – found herself trying to bridge a gap in understanding that had formed and continued to grow after she split herself.
There was no reason for her and her paired sibling to be dynamically opposites. They were both formed from the same pool – a pool that used to shift back and forth between opposites at a moments notice. Maddy had one spell that took advantage of this. Her eggseeds that turned to maggots or healing vines. The only reason this spell still worked was that it was grandfathered in. She had made it long ago – and had almost lost the ability since.
Maddy wanted to be able to freely change the affinity of her spells – shifting from healing to killing, from destruction to creation. She refused to abandon that strength.
Once again, this eye created a mental framework – less spell more hope full of shaped dreams. She tried to bridge the gap between the two – tossing metaphorical rope across the chasm that had formed. What was missing?
The idea of partial mana. The idea of “balanced” mana. Of her life and death pool poised on the pure intersection.
She knew part of the problem. Maddy’s eyes…they didn’t contain those transitionary barriers. Pure mana was weaker after all and when she had created her eyes, she’d separated it out into a single eye then ignored it.
What had happened to that eye? Maddy searched and found her pure mana eye wandering the world almost aimlessly.
There! Maddy brought her weakest eye over and focused on regaining strength. The main idea she had was…to increase her number of eyes. Every single eye except for this pure eye was an absolute end of a spectrum. If she added back something into the space between…well just look at herself. Creative Death light could have been [Creative/Destruction]-Death-Light. Creative-[Death/Life]-Light. [Creative/Destruction]-[Death/Life]-Light! Every single eye was like her – even the double and single affinities had the potential to meet in the middle – and indeed meet in strange weakened ratios with “affinity dials” at 20% or 54% or whatever other section she could imagine.
Maddy created the illusion of countless eyes each with different affinized drops of mana in them. Then she took her pure eye and sundered it – splitting its reality up amongst the countless “dead” eyes she had created. Immediately they threatened to fade away – too weak, too split apart to matter.
Maddy activated her domain, bolstering them all as temporary eyes and pushed a huge portion of the “resource” that was her skeleton into these eyes. She then combined them all into one once again feeling how strange and unstable the franken-eye felt.
Her pure eye was now dead – killed in such a way it wasn’t even respawning with barely a spark of her still remaining in each potential eye.
Her mangled body was overwhelmingly “Dead” with her bones contributing to this undeath, but death could become life and she had help.
These two eyes with their solo projects fixed minor flaws in each others work and filled gaps only they could fill. They then refined each spell one at a time – becoming the pair of eyes to have traveled the most time into the sea.
After the spell muscle healing ability was crystalized, it was integrated into Maddy’s soul – bound to her existence like a system given perk.
The new eye came back still dead but changed. More than it was – the body of what could have been grown and solidified into something strong.
And then she killed her dead body. Maddy conjured a simple knife with an edge sharp with delination and stabbed the returned eye – her knife snuffing out the spark that had remained in this body flickering and weak.
This eye – Maddy’s potential eye died and in doing so returned to her. Her eyes returned to her – dozens of new half sisters beginning to form in herself reincarnation chambers.
Immensely pleased with all her refinements and with a healthy respect for the sea, Maddy left the dungeon.
She left and spread across the world at the speed of light traveling back and forth across the entire hemisphere and finding countless secrets.
When she was done, Maddy turned to a dungeon she’d started to grow. One who’d finished growing while she was enduring the trial and waited patiently for enough of her attention to focus on it. Her Creative-Life eye had already entered it days ago – still golden from its interaction with R.
She could tell her eye was safe but cut off from the rest of her as if across an insurmountable distance.
Done with refinement, dozens of eyes finally entered the fae dungeon hoping to learn just what her new race meant.
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--- Richard ---
Richard lay burning right by the shore for what had to be days.
From what he could tell, the dungeon wasn’t actually trying to kill him – death though the trial was…a side effect. A side effect of giving up? Of biting off more than you could chew?
Technically right now Richard was biting off more than he could chew and yet he was so close to shore the sea was set to easy mode as if unaware someone could die a meter or two into its shallowest area.
What that meant was simple. Richard could not breathe or hold his breath well. He could not move in the water well. He could not resist the acidic properties of the water or ignore the pain. His ramping up skill was still with him but its ability to fix all the main willpower sapping parts of the trial was cut off at the knees.
And yet Richard was still alive. His body had forgone the need to breath at some point so him having weaker breaths was simply a way of filling his lungs with acid and causing immense pain and weakness.
His ramping up skill could not block the “trial” part of the trial but could prevent him from dying – it kept ramping up endlessly defending against death if nothing else.
And slowly Richard acclimated.
The pain never got better. His strength never grew. And yet he was alive and every bit of progress he made could be permanent if he let it.
Richard wiggled like a worm crawling with all his strength till he could grab the doll between his teeth.
His teeth fell out and yet enough gum remained he could hold onto the heavy fabric with his jaw.
Richard then worked to crawl up the slope – digging the whole way to create ledges of sand he could rest on.
The insurmountable hill was roughly one meter up and two back at the position he was. A mere 1:2 slope. 30 degrees of struggle. Just over 2m of hill.
If he stood up his head would be above water. That’s how close to shore he was.
It took him a day of stubborn rolling and full body lunging to climb that tiny slope. By the end of it Richard’s mind was so flayed he didn’t even realize he had reached shore once again.
His eyesight returned slowly over the course of an hour of struggle up the sandbank and Richard realized he was no longer in the dreaded water when he spat out a mouthful of dry sand and saw the doll in front of him.
It took another hour of recovery before Richard had enough strength to crawl back towards the sign and beg for his refined “shit” to be returned to him.
Immediately he felt better.
Richard found himself healing nearly instantly – his body and strength breaking through and ending with Richard laying on the sand cursing everything as cathartically as he could.
“…fucking water can fucking fuck its fucking burning fuck…”
When Richard was finally done his venting, he tried heading out for a walk. A quick pop up of his head through the mist around the area noted a collision of people blocking off the dungeon.
“Get out of there” Someone yelled as soon as they noticed him, but Richard ducked back in and went to play in the sand instead.
This dungeon had a stronger isolating effect than others – most dungeons let people who enter at the same time stay together while separating out the rest making it rare to meet up with others when you were in one. This separated everyone – entering the mist as a group left you alone as soon as you existed.
Neat.
Richard created a sand castle – his stone hands resonating with however much silica there was in the beaches sand – a surprisingly small amount. He added buttresses and arches and columns and a solid drawbridge with working stone (melted sand) hinges.
Richard finished up by setting up a fake army of sand people and sending a cannon shot with his hand cannon to smash the castle to bits.
Finally he was calm again. Tossing the same cannon into the water Richard waited a few minutes then went in and retrieved his shiny new weapon. He should have tossed the thing much further but a memory of how bad that initial refinement had been had pushed him in early.
Testing the new weapon Richard plotted out just how much it had improved before slowly upgrading all of his equipment with further and further tosses. His new AI. His Stone hands. His favorite chair.
The first problem appeared when he tried to upgrade his mantle.
The mantle itself…was basically already refined in terms of its raw aether concentration and would require an immense amount of time for any improvement…and also warned him as the mantle was not currently “doing” anything it had little to improve as an addon.
Exciting to be told no – considering the sign had said he could refine anything, getting such a clear “no” said quite a bit about the process.
His next few requests were done in the spirit of what Richard would call. SRQAD! Sea of Refinement’s Quality Assurance Department.
He made a shirt and everything – even chanted “squad, squad, squad” while trying to make a funny acronym and failing.
“Hey sign~. Please refine my ability to gain achievements”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine my connection to the system”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine yourself”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine the memory I have of my third-grade math teachers favorite meal and the way she let me try some of her sandwich that one time”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine 2x2”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine the sea of refinement”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine my telomeres if I still have any”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine half of an atom”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine this sandwich…yes, I know I can just toss it in the water I want to see you package it up for me.”
“Hey sign~. Please refine my esper hands along with whatever part of my brain now controls them”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine my ability to transfer my stats about…and also refine my chemical defensive stats while you’re poking around in there”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine something I don’t know about that will increase how awesome I am and not negatively impact anything I like doing”.
“Hey sign~. Please refine whatever field is interacting with my stats and causing my body to act like a dungeon or similar black box device”.
“Hey sign~. Sorry, love your work. Can you refine this scanner I can’t measure anything inside my body anymore and it’s breaking my stat shifting…oh! Yeah, I can just toss this in. Thanks”.
“Hey sign~. Me again. Can you refine this nest’s ability to become a sandwich nest? I already refined it once, but it just made all the monsters in it stronger and broke me being able to plant it on this beach. I’m running out of sandwich materials and there isn’t a good infrastructure to buy it right now…Yes, I’m sure. Thanks!”
“Hey sign~. Hypothetically, what would happen if I refined my ability to deal with people? I quite like how I am you know, but sometimes I wish I didn’t fuck everything up…no don’t touch my sense of humor I just want to stop…never mind. Forget I ever asked.”
“Hey sign~. Can you refine the flowrate and regeneration speed of this slot and the aetheric concentration and storage of this one? My 3rd slot I’m going to refine all together after as a control. Thank you!”
Richard tried as many different things as he could over days that turned into weeks. Turns out the sign was a filthy fucking liar and refused to help him refine anything truly weird…but the array of stuff it could package up for him was vast. Far crazier than you would think. How the fuck did it even remove that memory he barely remembered? What principle did any of this work off of?
It acted a bit weird whenever he tried to refine system stuff – his ability to interact with the system was refined easily enough but the system’s ability to give him achievements was not…maybe because the system wasn’t actually here? Maybe because Richard didn’t own the system so the sign wouldn’t pop it out of the moon and bring it here for him?
At the end of three weeks, Richard finally left his new toy a changed man. He had probably managed to refine some of the most items of anyone present or in the future. One of his favorite refinements was when he refined a sandwich into one of the tastiest creations known to man and then carefully dissected it in his popup lab, measuring exactly how it had been chemically modified to taste so good. MSG and massive globs of especially complex aether compounds for the most part. His most effective refinement had been his void body defense mixed with his “distributed body” perk and his mental defense.
Because of his initial hardship, Richard managed to leave his stats “cooking” in the water for over an hour before heading in after it. If it weren’t the memory of how close, he had been to dying in that first refinement, this would feel like cheating. The stone had been surprisingly heavy, but the stat return had caused him to pass out as his body morphed. The final remnants of organs or bones were now gone. Any part of his body was roughly equivalent to any other part of his body…some of his stats were now locked – he couldn’t affect quite a few of his existing stats even after improving his ability to manipulate them…but that was fine. It was well worth the boost to defense he’d gained.
It had been a long journey – with bones slowly mixing with flesh and bits of his brain growing in his arms and legs…
Well now Richard was a bag of omni flesh shaped like a man!
Of course, the majority of his experiments had been knowledge based or ways of improving all his tools.
Richard designed a chunky 3d printer and refined that then used the refined version to create an improved version he refined instead. He built and refined many items using this printer including several different types of scanners…but those were just tools. He hadn’t yet done anything special with them yet.
His least effective refinement experiment had been “fat stat” an experiment where he refined a single defensive stat over 20 times to map out the diminishing returns. At least that had given him a pretty good achievement?
Ether way. Richard was finally starting to get stir crazy so – with a mental note to come back whenever he wanted to boost anything with magic goop – he left the dungeon. Surprisingly, the barricades and protection squad were gone. He’d been expecting he would need to fight his way out, so this had been a pleasant surprise.
With a pulse of his AI Richard got James’s location and headed out.
The most frivolous user of the sea returned to the world.