Time and space were difficult to make out in this strangeness the Abyss’s core had thrown Rieren into. Thankfully, there was one thing that could ground her, even if it couldn’t guide her out of her situation.
New Achievement!
You have broken through to the Exalted realm! Your name shall now be sung far and wide. But with greater infamy comes greater attention. Beware the endless stream of traps and deceit.
Rewards
* 1 Level
* 1 Skill point
* 10 Credits
* 1 Domain Point
New Achievement!
Core of the Abyss reached! You have explored the very core of an integral world. The greatest truth is always the origin of things, for the root holds all explanations.
Rewards
* 1 Level
* 1 Skill point
* 10 Credits
* 1 Technique slot
New Achievement!
The depths of history have been plumbed! You have assumed the role of a historian who will stop at nothing to unearth the truth that may lie buried even in other worlds. Your sacrifice will be commemorated for time immemorial.
Rewards
* 1 Level
* 1 Skill point
* 10 Credits
* 1 Title: Abyssal Historian [Permanent +20 boost to Spirit]
It took a little time before Rieren had regained enough of her mind to recognize the sequence of words floating in her line of sight. Had the words been there all this time and she had simply been unable to recognize them before she had broken free of the Abyss’s grasp?
No matter. Rieren knew them now, and they helped her ground herself and recall her true self even better.
Rieren gripped the horns jutting from her monstrous shoulders and tore them off. The pain made her shrike, and her vision blurred with tears again.
Strange. Either the monstrous conversion hadn’t removed her tear ducts, or her head was slowly reverting back to its true form. Rieren would much rather prefer it be the second option. She wasn’t looking forward to tearing her head off her shoulders just to get it back to what it used to be. Rieren wasn’t even sure if she’d survive it.
Complete decapitation was a difficult thing to test.
Rieren decided to focus on the objectives she could accomplish. As she continued tearing off bits and pieces of her transformed body to let her perk recreate her true self, she focused on the achievements. They were still there. Good. She needed something to ground her.
Besides, the actual rewards were quite intriguing. This was her first title since leaving Lionshard Sect. That boost to Spirit would be incredibly helpful.
It wasn’t that her Essence-channeling was lacking behind. From the experiences of her past life, Rieren knew what the minimum she needed to channel effectively. Her current Spirit was still above the threshold that would allow her techniques to be as strong as she needed them to be. This boost would only make them even stronger. If she used it to that purpose, of course.
Rieren had the inklings of other ideas that boost would allow her to achieve. They were still nebulous in her head. She blamed it on her mind still being a little too monstrous.
A good reminder that she needed to focus on the actual rewards while reforming herself.
It was a little disappointing to receive a technique slot. She hadn’t received a new technique slot in a while, so it was a nice change of pace, but still. Rieren still had a free skill slot and she needed a skill selection point to pick a new skill.
In fact, she had been storing the skill points she had accumulated over the various achievements so that she could raise a new skill all the way to S-Grade as soon as she picked it.
Rieren pushed aside her disappointment and concentrated on her last reward. Another Domain Point. That was certainly welcome. She now had her Domain all the way to B-grade. She was pleased enough with it to focus on her [Status] and bring up the Domain information.
Domain: Ocean [B]
Channel the strength of an ocean and rule the stormy waves with your unshakeable will. Summons a realm of water around the user for 38 paces that enhances all Domain Aspects.
* Use: Twelve times per battle
* Synergized skills: [All]
* Synergized techniques: [All], [Domain-enhanced]
* Aspects: [Water], [Steam], [???]
* Summons: Dawn Cloud, [???]
* Special: Enhances recovery by 30%, Moldable Aspects
Ah, those were excellent improvements. She could add yet another Aspect to her collection and there was her next Domain Summons awaiting her selection. Rieren knew just what she’d pick, of course.
Ripping off one of her twisted legs elicited yet another scream. The pain was getting more and more acute now that her human side was overtaking the monstrous transformation.
Throwing away the limb, Rieren lay on the ground. She was doing well here. No giving up now, no matter how much the pain grew. She was not going to let the Abyss claim her. Focus. She had to focus on… on her [Status]. Rieren had yet to add all the increased stats. Opening her [Status] and blinking through a new flood of tears, she did just that.
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[Status]
Rieren Vallorne
Race: Human
Class: Divine Bladereaver
Profession: Enchanter
Realm: Exalted [Early]
Level: 38
Perks: Divine Resilience [A]
Titles: Abyssal Historian [+20 Spirit]
Stats
Body: 68
Mind: 46
Spirit: 46
Skills
Fray Passage [S]
Gale Blade [A]
Earthfell Blade [S]
Reaver Stance [S]
-
Techniques
Tidal Summon [C]
Call of the Past [Spirit Bond] [B]
Water Dancer Blade [D]
-
Domain
Ocean [B]
Rieren had to smile. That was satisfying progress. She had even added all the extra skill points she had attained to take most of her skills to S-Grade.
But focusing on the system would only take her so far. Things weren’t looking as positive as she had begun to hope. She might have recovered a great deal of herself, but there were certain areas she couldn’t reach, just by virtue of the restrictions of the human form.
Spots on her back, parts of her shoulder at the rear, and other such frustrating locations.
Ironic to think that she might not have had this problem if she’d let her monstrous limbs remain. They’d had better reach and flexibility.
Nevertheless… with a piercing shriek, Rieren gripped her guts and ripped in. She’d been pulling free what she could reach on her body mostly, so far. In certain cases, such as her limbs, her insides were bound close enough to her grip that what she pulled loose tore away both the interior and the exterior.
But she couldn’t neglect her organs any longer. The Abyss had twisted her insides in the same manner it had turned her outsides. Mostrous. Demonic.
Abyssal.
Rieren couldn’t have that. Her throat hitched as her screaming made her larynx finally gave way. All she could do was wheeze out in pain, biting her lip to prevent her consciousness from fading. She had to concentrate. There would be no point in removing and fixing some organs only to let the corruption seep out from the ones she had failed to excise.
It worked. As far as Rieren’s agony-riddled mind could comprehend, she was certain she had pulled free and thrown away all her organs. Some were harder than others, coiled this way and that, or too small and slippery to be easily handled. But bit by squelching, bloodied bit, Rieren chucked away her innards and let herself regenerate.
Certain organs made her pause. How long could she survive without her lungs breathing or her heart pumping blood through its vessels?
It was a good thing she was a cultivator. One lung went first, halting her breathing. Only after it finished regenerating did she remove the other and let it reform without any corruption. All the while, Rieren continued to channel Essence as furiously as she could. It ensured that she was circulating the corrupted Essence away from corrupting her renewed organs.
The heart was the most dangerous bit. Before she could rip it out as well, she had to tie off the two main vessels coming out of it so she wasn’t spilling all her blood everywhere.
If this had been any other time, if this had even been some horrific nightmare, Rieren would perhaps have fainted at the sheer terror of the moment. After all, she hadn’t just torn her heart out. She also had to keep her hands inside her chest, holding her main blood vessels closed until her heart had regenerated thanks to her perk.
The feeling of her heart growing out of nothing sent her very soul trying to crawl into some deep pit from which it never sought to rise from again. Rubbery muscle, soft at first, before toughening and beating with a life of its own, pulsed against her fingers.
She was starting to realize why people didn’t have nerve endings on the inside. Physically sensing her organs like that was terrifying.
And then came her brain. Was that not the seat of her soul? The source of her consciousness? If she eradicated it, would she be alive any longer. The heart was excusable—vital though it was, its function was still simple in the grand scheme of things. The brain, however, was anything but.
Batcat meowed softly. It was still curled around itself on the ground. Rieren had been spilling so much blood, so absorbed with righting herself, that she hadn’t noticed the mess she had caused.
“I do not know if I can continue any further, kitten,” Rieren said. Her voice sounded like her own again, thank the souls in the Beyond. Gruff, broken, scratchy from all the screaming, not at all recognizable as hers. But it was human all the same. “I—I cannot remove my mind. I cannot.”
Rieren was starting to choke up. Coming so far, making all this progress, only to falter at the final step. This was just as she had felt in the Abyss when she had first turned.
Batcat meowed again. It was insistent about something. Trying to tell her something. Rieren pushed aside her rising panic and tried to pay attention.
The kitten was on its side. Its wings were continuously flapping and it kept waving its paws this way and that as well. Rieren blinked at it. The kitten’s motion was strangely sinuous… almost ethereal. Like how she would imagine a ghost would move, untethered by the constraints of the physical world. A spirit’s motion.
Her eyes widened. Spirit. Impossible…
Abyssal Historian. That was what Batcat was trying to remind her about. Her title had given her an incredible boost to her Spirit, one that would greatly enhance any channelling she performed from here on out.
But one of the other applications she’d been thinking of before was using the extra Spirit to carry out a sequestered bit of Essence channelling separate from the rest of herself.
That was her way out of this predicament. Rieren could use the extra Spirit to construct a separate circuit that functioned on its own without connecting to her elixir field and the main map of meridians originating from and throughout it and the rest of her body.
Rieren focused. This was going to take some time. Nice thing about the Abyss was that time was meaningless here anyway, so she could spend an eternity without losing much.
The process was more intricate than she remembered. She had performed the creation of a separate Essence-channelling circuit before, in her previous life, but the instances had been rare and not one she had thought she would need to perform. It took too much time, effort, and concentration.
For one, she had to create a series of vessels that could carry Essence without touching her already-existing meridians. At the same time, Rieren would have to ensure her expanded elixir field wouldn’t swamp it or interact with it in any other way. Natural meridians already existed within a cultivator. It simply took some careful application of Essence to clear and open them.
Her current predicament was requiring her to create entirely new ones. One couldn’t create blood vessels naturally. It was the same with meridians. Rieren had to concentrate cell by cell within her head to create a mesh of artificial Essence channels.
She didn’t know when it was done. At some point, the orb that she had seen before was floating before her again. There was one important change, however.
Behind her, the Abyss was no longer screaming at her to move.
Rieren was still on the bed of endless sand. A desert with no end no matter which direction she turned. As she stood up, she checked every bit of herself, and felt every other bit she couldn’t see, though she stopped herself from plunging her hands within herself. She’d had enough self-mutilation for one timeline.
Everything seemed fine. Well, they appeared fine. Rieren still felt like she had gone to hibernate within a mountain, only for the mountain to erupt into a volcano. Her muscles were tense in expectation of pain, the ghost of agony danced across her skin and made her hair stand on end, and exhaustion had turned her limbs to hunks of stone.
Nevertheless, she bent to pick up the kitten. Through the orb, she could see the outside world again. The world that was awaiting her impact.
“It is time, Batcat,” Rieren said. “I might need your need your help once more.”