by A F Kay
He had realized something on the walk here. Since they couldn’t die in this realm, drowning didn’t exist either. It had made him wonder if he could walk along the bottom of the lake, breathing water like air. The thought had made him uneasy, and now, unless he found the entrance quickly, it would force him to test the theory.
Thinking about the icy water would only make it worse. Ruwen kept his boots on to protect his feet from any sharp rocks on the lake bottom and stepped into the water. He gasped at the cold but forced his other foot into the water. The bank dropped steeply, and in a few steps, the water had reached his neck. He took three deep breaths, holding the last one, and submerged himself.
Four more steps and the darkness of the lake pressed in on Ruwen. He pushed up the wrapping around his forehead, and the area in front of him burst into bright relief. Thankfully, no creatures appeared, but the entrance to the cave didn’t either.
At the edge of Ruwen’s vision, the falling water caused the lake to froth and bubble, almost as if it were boiling. Looking down, he couldn’t see the bottom. Unsure where the tunnel entrance began, he decided it would be better to stay near the surface.
He pushed upward with his legs and swam for the surface. While the weight of his clothes and dagger pulled him down, he could overcome it easily enough. A moment later his head broke the surface, and he took a breath.
The sound of the falls guided him as he swam toward it. He had never been a great swimmer, preferring books over being wet, but his parents had forced him to learn. He’d tried to convince them that Mages didn’t need to swim because their magic would keep them safe. They’d argued a Mage could drown because focusing on a spell while starving for air was almost impossible. So, he’d learned to swim, and now his Suffocation Bracer had taught him how to concentrate without air. His parents would be proud.
When he neared the falls, he angled toward the rock wall. He resisted the urge to look back at his friends to avoid blinding them. The air, saturated with water, felt heavy, and he swam closer to the wall to ease his breathing.
Directly behind the waterfall, Ruwen took a few deep breaths and then let himself sink into the water. He pressed his hands against the sheer wall that formed the back boundary of the lake, slowing his descent. He dropped for thirty seconds, his ears popping every few feet from the pressure, but didn’t see the entrance.
Slowly kicking his legs, Ruwen stopped his descent. He had enough air to reach the surface, but while he might descend a little faster next time, he would still end up in the same place. He needed to decide if he would drown himself and continue down.
He knew he didn’t need air here. Slib’s mouth and throat didn’t connect to his lungs, but his moaning and pain-filled cries never stopped. Ruwen’s brain rejected that logic, and the thought of breathing in a lungful of water made his heart race. While using his Suffocation Bracer had limited the amount of air he could breathe, it remained air. His mind would never allow him to fill his lungs willingly with water.
If he wanted to do this, he would have to force it.
They needed to find this tunnel. It would provide them the safety they needed while Ruwen figured out how to advance his Harvesting. When it came down to it, he didn’t have a choice.
Pushing off the wall, Ruwen stopped kicking his legs and let his body sink deeper into the water. His mind hadn’t panicked yet since oxygen still filled his lungs. Slowly he descended. Thirty seconds later, his rapid heartbeat had consumed most of his air.
Ruwen’s brain, sensing the danger, panicked. He desperately kicked and pawed at the water above him, trying to pull himself to safety. But the surface was sixty feet above him, and he had no hope of reaching it.
It took another ten seconds of frantic movements before the desperate need to breathe overrode any other thoughts. Ruwen opened his mouth and inhaled, filling his lungs with water.
A fire erupted in his chest, and Ruwen tore at his clothes. He screamed in pain, the water in his lungs rushing out, and the pain with it. A moment later, he sucked in another lungful of water, and the pain returned.
Ruwen dropped deeper into the lake, his screams like an echo of the thundering waterfall far above him. After each cry, he felt a moment of relief as the water left his lungs. He tried to hold that emptiness, reassuring his mind it didn’t need to breathe in this place. But he remained powerless against his mind’s survival instinct, and over and over again, he inhaled what felt like liquid fire.
His feet struck the lake bottom, and he flailed his arms to keep himself standing. Ruwen realized the pain he felt mirrored the pain of drowning, and that Juva and Slib, and maybe Nak, were feeling the pain of their injuries as if they were real. It was no wonder Slib’s speech had turned into an incoherent wail.
The pain in Ruwen’s chest, while excruciating, had become familiar enough that he could focus on his surroundings. Fifteen feet to his right, a black triangle ten feet high interrupted the brown face of the wall. He stumbled toward it.
A moment later, Ruwen confirmed the blackness contained a tunnel that sloped upward. He stepped into the tunnel and strode upward. After a few minutes, shadows appeared above him.
He stopped, and it took his mind, still consumed by pain and the burning need for oxygen, a couple of seconds to realize the water’s surface was just above him. Refracted light cast shadows against the ceiling of the hidden cavern. He had found it. Another few steps and the terrible pain in his chest could stop.
But Ruwen didn’t move. He knew if he broke the surface, and the terrible pain in his chest stopped, it would be difficult to force himself back into the water. He already needed to do this again after fetching his friends, and he didn’t want to do it three times. Fractal had said the cavern was empty, and Ruwen didn’t trust himself to only raise his eyes out of the water to confirm it.
Ruwen turned and walked down the underwater tunnel confident Fractal had told him the truth. His friends remained vulnerable on the beach above, and it gave him the willpower to stay submerged. He hoped this hidden cavern, and the tunnel beyond it, warranted this suffering.
And as the fire in Ruwen’s lungs became more familiar, and his thoughts cleared, he wondered if this might be an opportunity. Training to focus your thoughts and actions while feeling on the verge of death, but never actually dying, seemed like a chance few, if any, ever had.
Ruwen smiled. Just like his training with the Suffocation Bracer had prepared him to function with little oxygen, the Spirit Realm might teach him to perform while dying or in immense pain. And that seemed incredibly valuable.
But first, he needed to move his friends to safety.
Chapter 8
Ruwen waited in the underwater tunnel while the last of the group entered the cavern behind the waterfall just above him. They stumbled out of view as they left the water. He adjusted his head wrap until the light disappeared, and only the regular twilight of the Spirit Realm remained. He strode forward, eager to end the burning fire in his chest.
As soon as Ruwen broke the surface, his diaphragm convulsed. Water exploded from his mouth, followed immediately by violent coughing. A second later, he vomited the water filling his stomach. He stumbled forward and dropped his cloak, full of Slib’s parts, onto the beach. For the next minute, he coughed and puked as a horrifying amount of water left his body. By the sounds echoing in the cavern, his friends were doing the same.
“Unpleasant,” Sift shouted at Ruwen. “You call that unpleasant?”
Ruwen had been a little vague when he’d explained the sensation of breathing water to his friends. He held his stomach as he dry-heaved again. “Sorry.”
The hidden cavern had a rounded ceiling fifty feet above Ruwen. The cave itself looked a hundred feet wide, with half of that covered in water. A single tunnel left the back of the cave, and all the walls were smooth. This place had not formed naturally.
Hamma, still kneeling in the water, moaned and wiped her nose. “I never want to do that again.”
Ruwe
n planned to do just that, assuming he could advance his Cultivation Stage to twenty. But he didn’t expect anyone to join him.
Lylan sat on the beach, her arms on her knees, and her head hung between them. “This gives me an idea.”
Sift, on his hands and knees, groaned. “We have too many of those already.”
Lylan lifted her head, ignoring Sift. “We can train harder. Without fear of dying, we can go all out. It will speed advancement with no risk.”
Sift rubbed his arm. “Damage still hurts.”
“It’s just pain,” Lylan said and then smiled. “Just don’t get hit. A Step Master like you should be invincible.”
Sift looked up at her. “You never fight fair.”
“Shade’s first rule: fairness only matters to a Judge,” Lylan replied.
Sift groaned again, and Ruwen studied the injured in their party. Nak crouched facing the tunnel, only taking his eyes off it to cough up water. Juva lay on his side, water dribbling from his mouth. The pain from drowning, coupled with his torn body, had put him in a dazed state. Ruwen wondered if he’d snap out of it.
Ruwen opened his cloak and carefully removed the pieces of Slib. Ruwen had wondered what effect drowning would have on Slib. The bully’s mouth didn’t connect to his lungs, or to anything right now. What would happen? As Ruwen set Slib’s face on the ground, the bully’s eyes opened, followed by harsh coughing.
The largest intact piece of Slib’s body lay just out of the water where Sift had dropped it. The torso convulsed, and water sprayed out of the neck stump, spraying Sift.
“Are you serious?” Sift yelled and then crawled to the other side of Lylan.
“That was gross,” Hamma said.
Lylan laughed until Slib’s coughing grew stronger and splashed her legs. Both Lylan and Sift stood and staggered further away from the headless fountain.
“Burns,” Slib gasped. “My chest burns.” Then he began coughing again.
What kind of place was this? Even if your head had been ripped from your body, you could still feel the pain of drowning. Ruwen felt pity for Slib. The pain the young man was enduring seemed too much to fathom.
When Slib’s coughing abated, the bully passed out again from the pain. Ruwen fetched the larger pieces of Sift and then pieced him together as best he could. Hamma came over and helped.
“He’s a mess,” Hamma said. “I wish I could do more.”
“We’re doing what we can,” Ruwen said. “I’m going to ask Sift and Lylan to scout the tunnel. Nak will stay by you. If anything strange happens, wake me.”
“You’re going to sleep?” Hamma asked.
“No, I need to meditate,” Ruwen said.
Sift and Lylan agreed to scout and quickly disappeared down the tunnel that led to the mine. Ruwen sat against the wall near the tunnel entrance. If something unexpected arrived from this entrance, he’d be close enough to engage it.
With one final look at his group, Ruwen closed his eyes. The familiar ball of bright Spirit surrounded him. Rami had said he needed to Condense it. Since he couldn’t use Harden here, he needed to rely on the breathing technique. He pictured the book in his mind and read the text:
Condensing: The most fundamental breath. Inhale until your lungs are at capacity. Pull in sharply with the diaphragm as if you were coughing and focus this pressure inward, exerting the force on your center as you Harvest. Breathe out sharply and take three regular breaths before repeating.
Ruwen focused on the odd breathing pattern, performing the sequence repeatedly. Hundreds and then thousands of times, he executed the cycle. The surrounding light faded until it became dark, and he switched his focus to his center and the Spirit there.
The ball of light had shrunk to the size of a bandball. It looked dense and shimmered like it held shredded rainbows. He tried to pass a mental hand through it but felt immediate resistance. Not wanting to force anything, he stopped.
As he watched, the outside of the sphere grew fuzzy as the Spirit slowly expanded again. How could he keep it condensed without having to use Harden or a breathing technique all the time?
Ruwen had no idea what to do. With nowhere else to start, he parsed the level twenty Cultivation Stage quest.
Pick One Side
As a Novice, you Cultivated into two dimensions and as an Initiate, three. An Apprentice must embrace the whole, twisting their center to encompass both simultaneously.
This quest seemed full of clues with little of the normal nonsense filler. Hadn’t someone recently said something almost like this? Ruwen tried to remember, but then forced himself to stay focused on this task. The quest name made him wonder if he needed to flatten the dense ball of Spirit. Maybe flat, one side looked different from the other?
Using his mental hands, he squished the ball in his center. After what felt like a few minutes, he managed to make a disk, even if it remained a little thick. Disappointingly, both sides looked identical.
Ruwen returned to studying the quest. It mentioned dimensions, but he didn’t control those, so he kept reading. There were three key pieces to the quest left: embrace the whole, twisting their center, encompass both simultaneously.
Did the notion of being simultaneous refer to the “whole” and “center”? Or to the dimensions in the previous line? And by “whole,” did the quest cleverly mean “hole”?
He decided to take it literally and forced his hands into the center of his Spirit disk. Eventually, he turned the disk into a ring. Seeing the “ring” made his skin prickle. Was that important? He pushed the thought away and cursed himself for his inability to stay focused.
The quest told him to embrace the whole, so he wrapped his mental arms around his ring and squeezed. The middle drew together, forming what looked like a number eight.
The last portion referenced twisting, so he rotated the two halves in different directions. Maybe he was supposed to make some sort of braid.
No matter what he did, the Spirit continued to expand slowly. Twice he’d had to spend time Condensing to get the Spirit back into its dense form. He unraveled his latest twisting failure and stared at the distorted ring in his center.
Frustrated, he studied the quest details again.
Pick One Side
As a Novice, you Cultivated into two dimensions and as an Initiate, three. An Apprentice must embrace the whole, twisting their center to encompass both simultaneously.
Again Ruwen had the feeling someone had said something similar to him recently. Since he had exhausted all his ideas, he let his mind wander this time, looking for the connection.
He replayed his days backward, looking for conversations that might contain the phrase. When he found it, his heart thudded loudly in his chest. It hadn’t been some casual conversation with Sift. It had been with Blapy not long after she had killed him for Harvesting inside the dungeon.
Ruwen had believed the Harvesting room with the vast expanse of water and the islands with all the statues could not possibly be inside the Black Pyramid, and Blapy had responded: “Inside, outside, is there really any difference?”
Ruwen had stubbornly said there was a difference. When he recalled what Blapy did next, he thought his heart might explode: Blapy flicked her wrist, and a thin black piece of cloth, the length and width of Ruwen’s index finger appeared. She held the fabric between her hands and then twisted one side a hundred eighty degrees. Blapy pressed the ends together, and they merged. She handed the twisted circle of cloth to Ruwen. “Your beliefs trap you,” Blapy said. “There’s only one side.”
Ruwen let the memory fade, dumbfounded at his stupidity. Blapy had literally handed him the answer. She had given him an infinity ring, something he had studied in dimensional math. You could use a finger to trace around the ring, eventually touching both sides of it, and return to the beginning without ever lifting a finger. It was an example of a two-dimensional object in three-dimensional space.
Like the quest said, he had to pick one side. And the infinity ring only had
one.
The infinity ring had other properties that made it perfect. Because of its two-dimensional surface, there was no up or down. That meant things on the surface couldn’t expand away like his Spirit currently did.
Ruwen studied the quest a third time but kept the infinity ring in mind.
Pick One Side
As a Novice, you Cultivated into two dimensions and as an Initiate, three. An Apprentice must embrace the whole, twisting their center to encompass both simultaneously.
Seeing the answer now, it seemed obvious. Ruwen Condensed the Spirit in his center and then pulled the ring apart. He flipped one end around and then pressed the two sides together. His Spirit now had the shape of an infinity ring.
Ruwen shivered as his entire body flushed.
Congratulations, Rami said.
Thanks. That took me too long, Ruwen responded.
Yes. But now that you’ve formed a Core in your center, we can start.
Start what?
Teaching you real magic.
Chapter 9
Are you ready? Rami asked.
Yes.
Ruwen’s vision blurred, and when it cleared, he stood on what appeared to be granite. His breathing felt labored, like when his Suffocation Bracer had activated, and the air chilled his bare skin. He wore sparring shorts and nothing else. The wind pulled at his hair, and he touched his face, glad not to be wearing the face wraps.
Rami stood in front of him. The teenage girl wore a short-sleeved shirt and shorts. Behind her, mountain peaks pushed through a grey blanket of quickly moving clouds. Their location seemed to be higher than most of the other peaks, and Ruwen realized why he couldn’t breathe. They were very high in the air here.
Twelve pillars stood in a circle around them, and Ruwen didn’t see much else. It appeared the two of them stood on top of a mountain in some sort of open-air temple sixty feet across.
