‘Show my catalysts’
[Aspirant has discovered the following catalysts:...
[Aspirant has 5 more attempts of the trial remaining.]
After devoting hours to retrieving catalysts from the wreckage of rock, crystal, and scattered body parts, Ori, unfortunately, once again confirmed that voluntarily departing the trial instead of dying also counted as an attempt, thereby reducing his remaining attempts by one. However, upon tallying his total collection of catalysts, all negative thoughts dissipated in a surge of satisfaction. He now possessed tens of thousands of catalysts encompassing hundreds of varieties, some of which he could scarcely fathom their transformative effects upon the end of this ordeal. For example, would the Hardness Tocams fortify his skin? Would he be able to wield earth or rock magic due to the catalysts he acquired after being refined, or did the modest quantity of catalysts suggest a lack of affinity despite the sheer volume of rock he had pulverised and interacted with? After leaving the first two trials with only one catalyst, to say that he had come a long way from then would be an understatement.
Catalysts ranged from the kind you’d expect from a wild and outdoor environment embodying concepts such as Life, Vitality, Breath, Toughness, Nature, Growth, Regeneration and Decay. Meanwhile, some catalysts seemed to embody the nature of the creatures he came across, such as Feral, Menace, Cunning, Cruelty, Ferocity, Skittish, Daring, Callous, and Bestial. Beyond those were catalysts that seemed to either embody elemental forces of magic or physical properties he was familiar with, namely Lightning, Force, Charge, Current, Power, Arc, Flux, Conductivity, Rock, Mineral, Clarity, and Crystal.
Beneath the list was an option Ori wasn’t sure what to do with.
[Aspirant has met the threshold to fuse catalysts to create Lesser Essences of higher rank. Fuse Catalysts?]
“What are essences of higher rank and how will they affect refinement?” Ori thought he knew the answer to this question from Freya’s knowledge, but decided to ask Crucible for specifics anyway. Unfortunately, his query was met with silence. Shrugging, Ori mentally accepted the prompt and hoped that the general pattern of higher rank and rarity equals better, continued.
Although his body had been restored to pristine health and several draughts from the fountain had revitalised all that physically could be, his mind remained drained. Unable to resist the pull of slumber, he sat beside the fountain and succumbed to a deep sleep.
Ori had always been a lucid dreamer. While most experienced dreams sprung unbidden from the deepest crevices of the mind, Ori Suba couldn’t dream without designing the dream first. This meant that early in life, he often found himself unable to relate to the seemingly basic shared experiences of dreaming, for example, those strange and wonderful happy dreams of winning the lottery, or the nightmares of monsters, loss and violence.
Before his tenth birthday, Ori’s nights were dreamless. It wasn’t until a conversation about lucid dreaming with his best friend at the time, that he considered taking dreaming into his own hands.
The following night, Ori made his first dreams, dreams that sprung from half-remembered memories of a father, his imagination of a mother he never knew, a loving family he couldn’t have, living a life that would be never his. Upon waking from that first dream, Ori felt like he had discovered an alternative reality, a portal to a better life and as a result for most of his pre-adolescence, the waking world became merely the intervals between dreams, the moments where he planned and plotted his next slumber.
Later, Ori created and experimented with nightmares. Ones where he deliberately allowed his subconscious to warp unpleasant memories into something truly terrifying, to replay his worst fears or the actions he had truly regretted. In his dreams, Ori also explored the hidden corners of life, the paths not taken, those unvisited rooms and buildings, simulating opportunities and possibilities with a hopeful outlook, though one mostly grounded in reality.
Now resting on the plinth of the lifewell fountain, Ori's body lay still as his mind inadvertently re-entered the trial. Within his dream, his longing to discover what was behind the forest drove him towards that hidden edge of the horizon that seemed to curve towards the sky.
Here Ori was immune to forces such as gravity, friction and energy. He could see without being seen and experience reality as vague or detailed as his mood demanded. However, in this instance, the sights he beheld while flying above the forest canopy exceeded his ability to imagine.
The landscape seemed to ascend, towering beyond the clouds that drifted above. Unlike mountains and natural formations of rock and terrain, it was as if the land was curled upon itself like a Dyson ring or halo world. He ascended varied skies, ever-changing cloud layers and ecosystems of dreamlike life, each strangely haunting in their behaviour and appearance. Despite lacking a physical form, Ori felt the mist as he passed gas-bag-like jellyfish that floated above the clouds.
He soared through the highest reaches, discovering peculiar creatures and increasingly abstract biomes while time seemed to stretch with its dreamlike, intangible finiteness.
Golden bird-like beings, adorned with an unsettling number of human-like eyes flew around him. Droplets from celestial waterfalls transformed into stars, indistinguishable from the Milky Way. The essences of magic appeared to be carried by light, as glowing vapours twisted and flowed with the jet stream.
Meanwhile, the sky turned black as the thin blue line between the ground and the heavens resolved. Here, the sparse, twinkling constellations resolved themselves into entire landscapes of stellar nebulae and actinic light. Here, the spectral rays of aurora became tangible slivers Ori could touch. And as he formed an astral hand from night and starlight, catalysts of light like elongated diaphanous rods vanished upon contact just as they would have if he had touched them in the trial.
"Is this my dream or am I actually in the trial right now?" Ori wondered, surveying his surroundings in his astral body. He didn't want to be back in the trial; the trial meant danger, the trial meant challenge and strife. This was his dream, his refuge, his moment of peace and freedom and joy. How dare the Crucible take this away from him.
As if responding to his displeasure, roiling clouds grew until they formed anvils of cumulonimbus thunderheads that sparked and seethed with potential. Like clenching one's fist in rage, Ori expressed his anger, and in response a crimson jet of lightning erupted from the clouds below, streaking past him towards the dancing lights of the ion wind.
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"Alright then," Ori said in bemusement as his anger faded, watching a sea of sparkly catalysts drift in the wake of the lightning jet. Finding the notion of collecting each one exceptionally tedious, he simply inhaled them, reasoning that in his dream, he made the rules.
And then Ori looked towards the stars above and wondered, what if?
This was deus ex somnium; the god from the dream, however, there was still an instinctual reluctance to push boundaries, to shatter the gentleman's agreement that this could be a trial or just a dream. What unnerved Ori was the fact that he wasn't sure where this dream originated, which meant perhaps he wasn't in complete control.
And yet, this dream was drawing to a close. If there was ever a time to try something reckless, it would be just before waking up. His dream self considered the action impossible, only to be overruled by his inner nerd. With reasoning that made sense to Ori at the time, touching stars in this dream became merely audacious instead of impossible.
In the real world, nothing travels faster than light – the first of many subsequent phrases pupils learn about the cold, hard limits of reality. Conservation of Mass and Energy, Causality, the Laws of Thermodynamics and many others, defined not only why certain things could not be done, but the framework of how mankind could understand and predict the natural world in the first place.
Yet, there were often loopholes, moments where these seemingly insurmountable rules could be exploited. For example, even in the non-magical universe, two stars could exist whose relative velocity away from each other was greater than the speed of light. This occurred not because they were somehow breaking the universal speed limit, but because the universe itself was stretching and expanding between those two points, growing at a rate greater than the speed at which light could travel between them. ‘So by simply applying that method in reverse…’
Ori flexed reality, taking his envisioning of the void between stars and galaxies as air that could compress and shrink and making it manifest. At first, there was no visible change even though his dream self could sense the space itself fold, reducing the distance between points. The star he had reached out to, a beautiful bluish sun with a brightness similar to Venus at night, remained an unchanged pinprick in the sky.
This continued until the universe exploded with fifty-two years' worth of blue-shifted starlight all at once. The light was so intense that it would have flash-boiled Earth's oceans had this been anything other than a dream. Even Ori's god-like dream body felt the scorching, Doppler-shifted radiation.
A stellar prominence, large enough to swallow the Earth, belched out from the star. Laced with catalysts too bright to discern, the filament of plasma blown by magnetic winds bathed Ori in a shower of charged particles causing his astral form to glow with a lustrous nimbus.
Ori repeated this several times, pulling stars from the far-flung reaches of the cosmos in a dream as abstract and surreal as any he had ever experienced. At one point, two stars collided in a supernova, making all prior light shows pale in comparison.
Ori discovered thousands of Catalysts that seemed to fizz when brought near one another. With each movement of his astral form, creases of light left ripples in their wake, which in turn condensed into catalysts of Photon, Aura, Aurora, Luminance, Iridescence, and Radiance that he inhaled with every breath. Rarer still were lesser essences and the catalytic representations for Peritia, Mana, Aether, Quintessence, Breath and Grace.
He could sense them as flavours beyond taste, colours he couldn’t see but could happily assign as either blue, red, or gold, except that for example; while the colour blue felt right for both Mana and Aether, it was as if each was a version of blue as different from each other as red was from green.
It was the silver of Quintessence that seemed to steal his attention, however. It felt solid, more tangible, more indivisible than anything he had ever felt in the waking. It was as if it was somehow proof against the dreamlike nature of this unreality, something that could only be real, whether this was a dream or not.
It resonated with him like nothing else ever had, a calling that was both the spark and fuel to a side of himself he rarely had a chance to entertain, his creativity. He willed more of it into existence and condensed it along with all of the lesser essences of magic and light. If the Crucible could fuse catalysts to create rarer essences, why couldn’t he do the same in a dream? Not just fuse, but transform to create something new?
Mana responded directly to conscious intent, Aether seemed to beat with this latent heart's desires, Peritia filled his lungs with the blessings of life, while Grace seemed to coat his astral skin with a golden sheen that amplified his presence. But Quintessence responded to neither his wants nor needs but represented a calling from the universe, a promise that fate was not yet written and the primordial laws that govern even stars could be changed with a great enough will.
Ori imagined a whirlpool of light, light that vitrified under the weight of his will. As twilight approached in the dream, a sudden, perilous thought crossed Ori's mind. ‘What if I could create stars?’
It turned out that making stars was just as easy in this dream as achieving anything else was. Ori bathed in the radiance of the newly created blue hypergiant, a star with the luminosity of two million Suns. A stellar prominence arched high above his astral form in looping coils of charged plasma at scales beyond comprehension. He could feel the light, the heat, the pressure of energy and knew power, knew this to be creation at its most primordial, as even when this brightly shining star’s short-lasting life came to an end, hundreds, if not thousands of new stars like the one Earth orbited would emerge. Stars and planetary formation clouds laden with the ashes of the hypergiant, and from the ashes, life.
But from his own understanding, Ori knew this period of star formation to be the small flash of excitement before a long, cold quiescence.
Except that was not how the universe, reality, or what Ori had now come to know better as Fate, worked.
While dream logic and the Quintessence he had used to create the star evolved catalysts and lesser essences into increasingly rarer states, stellar nucleosynthesis fused Hydrogen to Helium, Helium to Carbon, Oxygen, Neon, Silicon and the many lighter elements of the periodic table, before Iron fusion preceded a collapse of the star's core.
Throughout its lifetime, the star swelled before a very rapid shrink, and then the dream turned inside out.
Ori flinched even though his astral form was impervious, but because he knew what to expect, just like the first trial, his mind was open and receptive to the experience of the very fabric of Fate itself being rewritten. It was as if the light of the universe's soul was revealed to him, a light that transcended creation or destruction, infinity and eternity, a light that seemed to be the foundation of the very concepts of existence and possibility.
Standing within the supernova, Ori reached out and touched this strange and profound light, and just like the Quintessence he had used to form his star, Ori found himself touching something far too real to exist within dreams, and then he awoke.
As the details of the dream faded and merged into his growing wakefulness, Ori shook his head at the strange, surprisingly fantastical dream he had just had.
Not anticipating any change, Ori once more took stock of all his gains.
‘Show my catalysts’
[Astral Aspirant has discovered the following essences: (list condensed, now showing only evolved catalysts and essences, Immortal rank or higher)]
∞ [Astral]
∞ [##Irregular Light##]
>999x [Celestial]
129x [Quintessence]
(Trace) [Domain]
(Trace) [Intelect]
(Trace) [Polydexterity]
(Trace) [Aether]
(Trace) [Mana]
(Trace) [Grace]
[Astral Aspirant has 4 more attempts of the trial remaining.]
“...the fuck?” Ori whispered in astonishment. For a long time, all he could do was stare into space and wonder if this was still part of the dream.
“Whoyh-yo? Ah… yes… I suppose you are something intriguing, at least by this age’s standards.” A slow, resonant voice answered.