Chapter 74
Unhallowed Maelstrom
Timeworn Flux [Weekly]
Difficulty Rating: 44/100 (Fluctuates)
Description: Bereft of restraints of the Higher Law, what becomes of a soul? Caught in a dimensional rift, a sundering of time, space, and all things within, a temporal squall of destruction... what becomes of reality? Intermittent specters of the grounded verity ensconced within the maelstrom of cosmic turbulence present a realm unchanged and uncharged, unfit for living. Can you endure it?
Goal: Survive & Escape
Rewards: 80,000 Souls, 100 Divine Gems, Upgraded Daily Meal [1x freshly baked loaf of bread + a small cup of strawberry jam + 1x freshly boiled egg + a small glass of freshly squeezed fruit juice (randomly chosen between apple, orange, pear, and cherry)]
Secondary Rewards: Scroll of Truth, Unlocked 15x15 (feet) unadorned courtyard, 3x random flower seeds
Asher paused, uncertain.
Neither the description nor the goal spoke at all of what he’d actually be doing inside the Stage--the description was just a vague word vomit of nonsense that hardly had a point, and the goal was scarcely any less vague. ‘Survive & Escape’ could fit into so many contexts that they may as well be generic terms without true meaning.
But the temptation persisted, almost like a constant drumming in his ear. Desire awoke and the yearning cruised through his veins like a river. An itch to challenge the unknown paired with the allurement of the reward was a flood that he could not stem.
He cracked.
Darkness surged and pain pulsated--but, unlike every other time... it did not stop. Not immediately, at least. It lasted a long while, almost ten-fifteen seconds by his estimates, becoming nigh unbearable toward the end.
Asher landed on wet dirt and started gasping for breath immediately, sweat pouring out of his back aggressively. It took him nearly half a minute to gather, finally looking around. The world was... plain, causing him to frown.
There were frolicking birds frozen mid-flight, swaying, lustrous trees in the distance, grassy plain stretching in every which direction, clear blue skies above, and the luminous sun... rather than alleviating some of his worries, it did the opposite.
Furthermore, there was no ‘choice’ of a weapon--he was only offered one.
Temporal Edge [?]
Description: At the twilight of creation and the brink of dissolution, where the threads of existence entwine and unravel, all realities converge in a cosmic crescendo. Within the warfare of creation, the cosmic onslaught of all things visible and otherwise, totality bled. It was within that chaotic hurrah that a singular blade bled out from within the creation’s amalgamation. Timeless, formless, thoughtless, soulless, and as elusive as the shadow of death itself, all who touch the blade weave new fates, yet they will forever forget its origin. It lingers in the edgeless void, perpetually whispering ethereal melodies, as if plucking the strings of time itself. Those who hear its haunting notes are stripped of memory and reason, cast into an eternal darkness.
Effects:
-- Allows for a temporal and spatial transposition
-- Dimensionally attuned; shields the wielder through the endless flux
-- While being held, halts aging completely
-- All those who make direct contact with it aside from its wielder age and wither, becoming transient particulates of the blade
-- The swings have a chance of rippling across dimensional membranes
Asher's frown further deepened.
More and more, things were knotting. More vague verbiage atop an already confounded foundation cast little light on the actuality of his situation. Rather, was the blade even a weapon? Or was it more of a concept?
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Considering that its silent hums managed to echo out even as the rest of reality was paused, it stirred his innermost heart. He saw it, even, jutting out through the membrane of reality--phasing in and out, thoughtlessly formless yet corporeal in the strangest sense. It was difficult to wholly articulate it, as it was akin to witnessing a conflux of countless cords of everything. It would vibrate, shuddering the cast of reality surrounding it, and phase into a form for a moment before vanishing.
Eerily enough, Asher found his right arm freed suddenly as he reached out toward its bleeding form--through the temporal cage, he came undone and freed, and grasped the tantalizing filaments of something that could not be understood.
Holding the blade, he felt suffused and freed whole--he could move, at will, while the rest of the world remained still. Rather, even the 'screen' that informed him of the weapon remained in the rear, suspended in the air, unmoving.
There was no resistance to his moving--there was no gentle air caressing against his skin, no gravity pushing against his body, no sensation of sun’s rays burning into his skin. He stopped quickly, feeling sick and nauseous; his body was beyond confused and confounded and could make neither heads nor tails of what was happening.
Taking a deep breath, he managed to calm himself down and ‘clasped’ tighter against the blade’s handle--it was strange. Within his eyes, he was holding nothing. Yet he held a firm grasp on something very much tangible, something that pulsated with life, almost like he was holding a still-beating heart.
Undoing the spell of the frozen world, life began moving once again. The proper sensations returned, and the chilling, biting wind was welcomed.
The birds began to sing--they resembled canaries, though sported obsidian-black feathers and much larger bodies.
Asher observed as far and as wide as his eyes could see--but no enemies were spawning in. No monsters or people rushed and converged toward him, wanting to swallow him whole. There was only a pristine, beautiful world, bereft of scars and pain.
Until there was not.
Something howled from the bowels of the world itself, and it was as though the sound ripped the cord that was holding the world together. Shadows surged from the formless edges and the familiar shapes began coming undone and changing. The trees twisted and curled unto themselves, forming into shells before bending outward into an upward rain of butterflies.
The countless blades of grass shimmered and shuddered, splattering outward. Within the blink of an eye, they flickered out of existence before suddenly appearing above them, while the blue sky reappeared beneath his feet. And yet, it changed, too; the slightly gray clouds began to split like cotton balls and separated from the sky, dancing around him before the screeching wind carried them off.
The world drifted and changed, surmounted in darkness; distant mountains bent forward like curious observers before turning into fluid, wavy towers of gold. Then those very towers dissolved into a thousand, ghastly wolves that ran wild across the grassy plains that were now the sky, their howls causing ripples in the air itself. And from within those ripples, void came crawling out, darkness belating the light hidden within.
Walls suddenly shot out from the sky beneath him, building up a castle within an eye’s blink--yet the grating, marble walls twisted and contorted in ways so unholy Asher began to feel sick. They folded within their own confines and in such ways that it was as if he were looking at them from multiple angles at once.
A shelf of books ruptured abruptly and scattered like fleeing deer, pages fluttering like wings. The shards of the shattered shelf converged and formed a dining hall of tables and chairs--but their edges blended and curved in such eerie and deformed ways that they defined normal geometry. He could see the insides of objects, like a book that was both open and closed at the same time.
By now, there was a confluence of everything--objects could not be discerned fully individually. They lost their coherence, merging and separating in a chaotic fashion. A lamp transformed into a pulsating orb of light which then flew out toward the sky that had shifted from the grassy plains into a cosmic array of colors and lights, whereupon it turned into a tangle of metal vines that began to writhe and twist around the forming stars in the sky.
One of those stars then stretched out like dough, contorting a thousand times in a second before it formed a clock--it only permeated for a moment, its edges beginning to liquefy like blood. Yet, that moment was enough to twist Asher’s concept of time wholly--the clocks’ hands spun wildly, reversing directions, and skipping seconds as if caught in a temporal loop. The numbers turned into drops of amber that fell toward him, shifting into a thousand blazing condors. Each flap of their majestic wings aroused the spirits of the wind and scattered the colors and shapes that began to form.
Eerily, everything changed--even the way the textures felt. A scrap of wood phased through his fingers all of a sudden, yet it did not feel like wood. Rather, it was wet and congealed, like gel.
All this flurry, horrifyingly, occurred within the span of just three to four seconds. Asher found it difficult to breathe and began to disassociate from everything--his mind cried and raged at being so wholly overwhelmed that it could barely function. All he wanted to do was lie down and close his eyes and pray the nightmare away, yet he couldn't.
As if by instinct, he shifted ever so slightly forward and managed to dodge a slithering blade of some unseen thing. The attacker appeared momentarily as a blurred, multi-limbed specter before shuttering into liquid shadow and phasing into the ever-shifting world.
Nothing seemed real.
It was as though a thousand things were all happening at once and spaced out, as well as within the same point in space as well as everywhere else. He glanced down and, to his abject horror, saw his intestines twisting; his skin had turned wholly transparent, yet would phase into reality right after. However, it was rough to touch, as though not skin at all but rather a stretched-out piece of sandpaper.
Adjust.
Adapt.
Overcome.
He bit hard into his tongue until he wanted to blow out in pain--though it hardly did much to distill the sense of horror in his heart, it sharpened his mind just long enough to bring it to the surface. The difficulty was just 44--yes, it was disorienting, yes, it did not make any sense, yes, it broke all known laws of physics... but, it was just 44. That was the comforting thought--that no matter how twisted, unholy, and unnatural the world around was, it was numerically only 44/100 hard. All else be--and was--damned.