"Kill a man, and he'll fear you for a second,
but break a man...
and his descendants along with him will fear you for a lifetime."
Darius felt his head spinning from the unexpected mental intrusion. When The System sent an instant notification, the slight amount of mana imbued in the message caused your mind to jolt upon receiving it. It was a pain in the ass, but nothing could be done about it. Darius felt his insides twisting and outsides melding into nothing more but a triangular form and then back again. Paralyzed, shocked, and nearly incoherent from fear, he switched back and forth from so many states it was impossible to see the true Darius slip out in the blur.
One moment, Darius felt his arms wiggling and jiggling and looked down in horror to see that he had become a Blue Slime monster of some sort. The next, he felt a strong force tugging at his arms and realized that he had become a Boulder-Hould Giant. Twenty seconds later, the changes were too fast to see, and Darius didn't dare to look down either way. Different from that visceral and gory feeling of watching this scene on TV, he felt everything. He felt all the wrongness of every biological structure shifting and twisting his innards. All of this takes quite some time to explain, but these things happened in under a minute. At the end of the process, he realized that he had experienced what it was like to be every single biological race that the Ordo Rendia knew of.
After shifting back into his human form, he felt the most significant mental intrusion he had ever felt in his life. Generally, mental intrusions increased with the significance of the feat. Darius supposed that biologically becoming a member of every race, subspecies, and gender was quite an accomplishment.
A Bane Or A Blessing? Your Actions Will Decide.
Well, that's ominous, Darius thought. What could be worse than that?
As soon as Darius's mind chanced upon that thought, he dropped like a stone and onto hard rock. Except - he didn't fall. His nose hovered but three inches above the ground. His figure eventually arose, and it was then that he realized with horror that he could not control a single function of his body. In other words, he was trapped. Deprived of all his actions and senses, Darius felt trapped by his consciousness. For the first time in his life, he wanted to exceed his consciousness and travel out. It was then that he noticed a single human in the clearing, tending to Lillies.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
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Damisch liked gardening. Contrary to what everyone else in the hot, tropical city of Manaus believed, he thought it was a great stress-reliever. While everyone else in the town ate ice cream out on a hot day or traveled to the mall to cool off, Damisch made sure that his lillies were watered, that his roses were fertilized, and that his violets were placed in just the right sunlight concentration. Everything was calm, and he took out his phone to call his mother.
His mother was the one first to plant the idea of gardening in his head. His father had placed him on the route to become an engineer, and that kind of life felt unfulfilling to Darius. He didn't want to go through life fixing things for other people and living for his paycheck. He didn't love engineering. But gardening... Gardening felt just right. Something about the way his charges would point to the sun every morning, ready for another day of life, boosted his spirits just a little bit. Damisch was a grown man of 23 years, but he still treated these dainty flowers like they were his flesh and blood. He laughed a little bit at his oddity, then waited for his mother to pick up the phone.
A couple of seconds later, the familiar ring of the phone took him back to his childhood, hearing his mother pick up the home phone and respond to whoever was calling kindly, whether it was an internet salesman or prospecting car advertiser. Damisch even remembered the awkward time that his mother invited a Jehovah's WItness in for dinner, and he chuckled at the embarrassing but fond memory.
He picked up the phone, fully expecting to hear his kind and comforting mother's voice on the end of the line. The line crackled out and started sputtering out an electronic discharge. The phone seemed ready to blow up with the excess energy stored within it, and Damisch dropped it like a hot potato. It appeared to nearly burn a hole in the ground as it simmered in the baking Manaus air. He yelled out to his mother on the phone to check for a response. He didn't hear anything.
A Bane Or A Blessing? Your Actions Will Decide.
A grim, low-pitched voice rang through the air, permeating the surroundings. Every electronic device put all of its electric power into blasting this voice into the surroundings. Damisch had heard of sound damage before, but nothing on this scale. Near the city center, people were knocked back in the hard-earth ground, voices still ringing in their ears and haunting them for years to come. Damisch, on the outskirts of the city, had it slightly better. All the electronic devices in the town seemed to explode with all the rage they'd stored over more than six decades of human dominion, and the world broke.
Damisch watched with wide eyes as his favorite flower pots began to crack and shiver as if some external force had possessed them. Then, the power hit him too. Lying down on his back, unconscious, he saw the world rend into ten equal pieces. A shimmering veil seemed to cover the top nine layers, and he almost thought he saw the infinite darkness of the void above all ten layers.
Before passing out, he saw his favorite petunia flower pots shatter. He let out a single tear in the darkness. He would later learn that it would have to be his last.