by H. C. Mills
Lavi absorption from Aether is down by half, but if it’s still this high, I can handle this place even without my yams.
I wave away the window and start looking around for landmarks. However, no matter which way I turn, it’s just more desert. Far in the distance, I can make out some vague shapes, but they’re blurred by what appears to be a thin yet omnipresent cloud of dust, or I guess sand.
Is that an effect of the weird gravity here, or artificially induced for the Trial, to make navigation harder?
I tilt my head back again, but there are no obvious constellations in the shape of an arrow or anything. Eh, it was worth a shot.
Expectantly, I take the Yin Focus Crystal out of my pocket. Once again, my fingers tingle pleasantly as I touch it, but the feeling quickly fades away as I continue to hold it until it’s like an inert—if slightly chill—rock in my hand. I put it back in my pocket and take it out again, but the tingles don’t make another appearance.
I try waving it around, pointing it in every direction I can think of, but it doesn’t react. No feather-light pull, no slight vibration or flash of light, not even the minute change of temperature I half-expected. Just nothing. Hell, I’d take a vague smell at this point!
I check. It doesn’t smell.
With a sigh, I flop down on my back in the soft sand.
“Guess I’ll be searching with nothing but my spidey-sense,” I mutter.
I bring the crystal up to my face and examine it closely. After a little while, I close my eyes and gently slide down into a lucid trance, trying to sense something, anything, coming from the crystal.
I don’t. At least, not from the crystal. I sense something beneath my skin. It’s the slightest tingle, the most minute pull, accompanied by a very brief flash of cold, like snowflakes darting through my veins.
The sensation comes sporadically, from random places all over my body. No, wait, there is a pattern. It’s all moving in the same direction—towards the crystal!
Even though having cold flakes—of energy, I think?—crawling beneath my skin is super creepy, I hold fast and keep studying the way they move. The flakes work their way up my arm very slowly, until they come within a certain range of the crystal, where they suddenly accelerate the rest of the way and finally push through my skin into the crystal.
Perhaps that was the source of the original tingles!
I move the crystal into my other hand and indeed find that my fingers tingle as the energy inside of them rapidly gets sucked up. Still no reaction from the crystal, though...
Maybe it just needs more. Can I speed the process up? Judging by what was in the description, the stuff it’s sucking out of me is probably Yin Qi. At the very least it’s not Lavi, so it probably can’t kill me...
I could rub the crystal all over my body, I suppose, but that seems like a time-consuming and ultimately not very efficient process, so I decide to try it the sensible way first.
I keep my eyes closed and focus on directing the tiny flakes of what should be Yin Qi to move towards the crystal.
The effect is so slim at first that I’m not sure if I imagine it, but I persevere. Soon, my practice pays off, and I’m able to push the tiny flakes of energy to move up my arm at a steady pace.
It’s a bit of a trek for them though, and I soon grow impatient, so I switch to placing the crystal on my chest and start pushing my Qi to there. This works a lot better, and soon enough, I feel the crystal grow noticeably colder.
When I break my trance and open my eyes, I find that my Focus Crystal dimly radiates a bluish light.
I watch in fascination as energy visibly pushes through my skin to rush in, and the glow and the cold slowly intensify. Pretty soon, the increase levels out, however.
Is it in some kind of equilibrium?
I wait for a while longer, watching to see if anything will change. It does, but not the way I hoped.
It soon becomes apparent that the concentration of the tiny flakes in my body is dropping, and as their flow towards the crystal decreases, so does its glow.
The moment I realise what’s going, on, I get up and start turning on the spot, holding the crystal out in front of me. Maybe now that it’s filled with energy it—
Wait—Yes! There!
As I hold it in a certain direction, the crystal reacts with an ever-so-slight pull.
[Oh? Did you charge it already? Not bad.]
I smirk and wave the crystal around a bit more in an attempt to get a more accurate bearing. “What can I say, I’m just talented that way. And, well, Meditation level 2 came in pretty handy.”
[Hmm, yes, it’s quite a useful Skill. You’re lucky to have developed it this early. Or at all, frankly.]
Again, a casual comparison to other participants that reveals supposedly classified information. Suspicious. Still, considering what I had to go through to get this Skill, I suppose I could’ve easily speculated that not many would develop it, or at least not this soon.
“Didn’t feel that lucky when it happened,” I remark dryly.
[Pain is temporary. Growth lasts.]
Easy to say for a being without a physical body.
Anyway, I’m pretty confident I’ve found the direction I’m supposed to travel in now. Just to be sure, I turn a full circle to see if the crystal reacts to any other direction, but it doesn’t.
I confirm my bearing one last time, while the crystal’s glow slowly fades. Seems like it ran out of juice. I don’t feel many more snowflakes beneath my skin either. I hope they’ll build up again or something. Otherwise, I’m probably pretty much screwed.
For now, I put the crystal back in my pocket so I can avoid direct skin contact with it.
I set off feeling pretty darn satisfied with myself. Before I even make it to ten steps, though, the world around me changes.
A flash of light blinds me, and then a wave of heat washes over me. When my vision clears, I carefully look up, with my hands shielding my eyes.
“What the—where the hell did those come from?!”
CHAPTER 21
Living in the sunlight
ABOVE ME, IN THE MIDDLE of the sky, now hangs a familiar pair of stars, one orange and one blue. They suddenly appeared there and began heating my skin.
[That’s just the Twinstar entering its active phase.]
“The Twinstar?”
[Indeed.]
“All right.” It’s One. Sure, makes sense.
[What a boring reaction.]
“Always happy to disappoint. Now, tell me what you may about this Twinstar.”
[The Twinstar has a cycle of about seventeen hours, a little over six of which it exists in an inactive state. The rest of the cycle it shines as it does now. What you just witnessed is somewhat analogous to Earth’s sunrise, except that the Twinstar doesn’t actually rise—or go anywhere, for that matter. It’s just starting to shine again.]
“So ‘it’ doesn’t move at all?”
[Our relative positions are stationary. I suppose you could consider it another effect of the short range of gravity in this Realm.]
Crazy.
“Then this place has almost eleven hours of ‘daytime’ each seventeen-hour ‘day,’ and an approximately six-hour-long ‘night’?”
[That’s one way of putting it.]
Well, I guess it’s not the worst thing about this place.
But that means almost eleven more hours of this light and heat, and I’m already feeling hot under the collar.
I roll up the sleeves of my uniform and take a sip from a bottle of Hydrum before setting off again, continuing in the direction my footprints were heading. Should be close enough to where I’m supposed to be heading for now. I’ll try getting my bearings again in ten minutes.
Man, I already can’t wait to be out of this heat.
Ten minutes later, I attempt to use the Focus Crystal to navigate again. However, it seems like ten minutes wasn’t enough for me to recharge even a quarter of the energy I used earlier to activate the
crystal. The crystal barely lights up from what I’ve produced, and definitely doesn’t noticeably pull, no matter where I point it.
At least I generated some energy at all. Guess I’ll have to wait longer.
It’s only an hour later that I try again. This time I get a strong reaction from the crystal, pretty much as strong as the original one that set me upon this path. It also turns out that I didn’t shift off course too badly, but I still have to adjust my heading by a couple of degrees.
Unfortunately, not much has changed over that full hour of trekking. It’s still hot, still zero visibility, and there’s still the occasional meteor slamming violently into the grid.
One minor change would be that the terrain is becoming more difficult to walk on, as the flat sand gradually makes way for increasingly steep dunes. This makes it harder to walk in a straight line, and honestly to walk in general.
A second change comes in the form of this lovely message.
Well, crud. Nothing I can do but keep walking, I guess.
I. Hate. This. Desert.
I’m sweating like a pig and—to make up for it—drinking like a middle-aged Brit in a pub that’s about to close.
That’s not the worst part, however. At the start, I barely noticed the Overheated Status Effect, but as the hours rolled by, the desert got hotter, and so did I.
“Open Status Window.”
I’m already 7.4 Onkh over my Tolerance Limit for Heat!
At least the effects aren’t all that strong. I guess Heat is relatively much less damaging than Toxic Energy. Still, combined with the low level of Lavi in the air, it’s beginning to get dangerous.
Looks like I may be needing those yams soon after all.
Frankly, low Lavi isn’t what I fear right now though, it’s one of those other status conditions: ‘Heatstroke.’
If I were to enter into a state of confusion and start wandering around aimlessly, not paying attention to my Status Bar, I’d be dead before the Twinstar enters its inactive state again.
Okay, that phrase is a mouthful, I’m just gonna call it nightfall from now on.
Anyway, to prevent that, I stop for a moment to take off my uniform’s top and wrap it around my head for shade, which leaves me in a tank top, rolled-up slacks, and my trusty sneakers.
What I’d really like to do right now would be either to drench my body in Hydrum or enter a lucid trance. Under the circumstances, I dare to do neither.
I can only hope I reach the exit in time.
Six hours. I’ve been walking through this hell for six hours, and there’s still no sign of an exit. Aside from the high temperature and the sand, there is now a third demon to contend with.
Boredom.
Obviously, I turn to Suri for relief.
“This Twinstar is killing me... How about you throw me some shade, Suri?”
[You’re aware that I have no physical body, right?]
I snicker. “It was a joke, Suri. Throwing shade is slang for insulting people.”
[You wish me to insult you? I’m not sure if I should. Sweating is quite thinning, and you could still stand to lose a few pounds.]
“Oof, that’s cold, Suri. Unfortunately, metaphorical cold doesn’t seem to physically cool anything in this Realm either... Eh, it was worth a shot.”
[Did you really think that would work? The laws in this Realm may be odd to you, but it’s not like they were made up by a toddler, Emma.]
“Yeah, ehm, you can stop now, Suri. It’s not helping.”
[Are you sure? I don’t mind trying a little longer.]
“Positive. Please stop.” Turns out I prefer being bored over being insulted. Who knew?
The only other relief for boredom I get is when I use the crystal. I’ve gotten better at directing the energy beneath my skin to flow towards it, to the point that I can just charge it in my hand now.
Every time I check my directions, however, I’m a little farther off course. I hope it’s because I’m getting closer, but I fear it may be because the dunes are ruining my attempts to walk in a straight line.
Seriously, these dunes are getting ridiculous. There’s only one explanation I can come up with for these high-stretching shapes: they must have their own gravity fields! Some of them are huge, yet when I went to the effort to actually climb one of those suckers, I still couldn’t see much from the top.
That’s due to the only thing I hate more than the Heat here: the sand hanging in the air. It seems like the sand cloud has become denser and denser as I’ve progressed through the desert, to the point where visibility is down to 30 feet. To make matters worse, the sand is also coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
There is some good news, though. Even though the Twinstar is still shining, the desert is no longer getting hotter. What’s more, I’ve been keeping track of the Heat in my body, and its build-up has steadily been slowing down, and now even appears to have reached an equilibrium.
“Status Window.”
Since my net Lavi is now 0, I still haven’t needed to eat a yam. Go me.
On the other hand, I already drank half of my Hydrum and I don’t seem built for developing Heat Tolerance.
I only reached 0.2% in six friggin’ hours.
What am I, a snowman? Am I supposed to start singing about summer now?!
I better come across something—anything—soon.
The eighth hour just passed. I’ve taken to playing I Spy with Suri.
“Kay, I spy a brownish... goop,” I say, as I trudge around another pillar of sand. “And it’s commonly found on beaches.”
[Sand.]
“Yup.”
I can’t even see the tops of these pillars anymore—it’s like walking through a forest. At least the shade is nice, but the breeze has died down, so it’s not much cooler. I tried to climb one earlier, but the sand was too loose; it just crumbled beneath my fingers.
“Kay, I spy a... ehm... substance made of tiny particles of eroded rock.”
[Sand.]
“Yup. Man, Suri... you’re just, unbeatable,” I mumble. Talking is hard right now, because my mouth, too, is sand.
[I’m getting a little worried for your sanity, Emma.]
“Ah, Suri. Once again, you are a day short and a dollar late.”
[I see. Well, do me a favour and hang in there, Emma. Perhaps you should drink some more?]
I chuckle but take another sip from my waterskin. Mmm, lukewarm Hydrum, my favourite. At least it flushes the sand from my mouth. For now.
“Don’t worry, Suri, I’m not that far gone yet. Just havin’ a laugh.”
[Indeed. When did you last check your heading?]
I stumble to a halt. When did I last check? A wave of unrest clears some of the cobwebs in my head.
Mumbling to myself, I take out the crystal and stimulate my Qi. Snowflakes dance beneath my skin towards it until it lights up relatively brightly.
Shit. Must’ve been a while, then.
I hold it in front of me and frown.
I’m getting nothing. What’s going on here? Is it just that I can’t focus well, with how hot it is out here? Did the crystal break somehow? Am I now flying blind, lost and delirious in my personal hell?
Did I finally go mad?!
[Try and keep a cool head, Emma.]
Ah yes, good idea. I unplug the waterskin with my left hand and lift it overhead, liberally pouring the last bit of its contents on the uniform covering my head. I still have about half a litre left in a bottle in my backpack, anyway. I think.
[Not exactly what I meant, but perhaps it will help.]
I swivel the crystal to my left, trying to get my bearings.
Still nothing.
The right, then. Nothing, nothing, noth—wait... yes! It’s there! The pull is quite strong too.
Does that mean I’m getting close?
I stick the crystal back in my pocket and take off with renewed vigour. Having to go around large pillars of sand makes it harder to keep h
eading in the right direction, but I try to counteract it by strafing.
Five minutes later, right as I’m about to lose hope again, I spot a vague shadow to my right. As I head towards it, a small stone building looms up out of the ever-present cloud of airborne sand.
CHAPTER 22
Perfect score
ASTONISHED BY THE SUDDEN appearance of a small stone building in this seemingly endless desert, I stop in my tracks and try to wipe the sand from my eye.
“Suri, am I hallucinating? Quick, pinch me!”
[You very well know I can’t, Emma.]
Hehe, sucks to be you.
I come up on the building and find it’s like the top of a square tower sticking out of the sand. The wall I’m facing is blank, so I walk around it with my heart pounding.
Instead of the ugly carving of a human I’m expecting, I find a large, incomplete Yin-Yang symbol. Where normally the black dot in the white half would be, there is a hole.
Ah. I insert the Yin Focus Crystal.
For a second, nothing happens. Then the symbol starts revolving. The two halves of the symbol split and rumble apart, revealing a slide that spirals down into the dark. As the stone grinds to a halt, the Yin Focus Crystal drops out again, right in front of my feet.
I pick it up and stick it in my pocket.
I hesitate for the briefest moment, before deciding to end the Trial right here and now.
It’s not like there’s any point to further training my Heat Tolerance, considering the rate at which it’s been going.
Also, more importantly, screw this desert.
I sit down at the top of the slide and push off. As I whoosh down into the dark, I hear the stone grinding shut again behind me.
It’s a long slide. Much longer than I had anticipated. At first, it was pretty exhilarating, but it’s been pretty monotonous for the last two minutes or so. It seems clear it was built for efficiency rather than—
