Chapter 224. A Versatile Reward (Patreon)

I suppress a blush and avert my eyes to the surroundings, a flowery meadow with hand-sized butterflies.

“You’re lucky Crystal isn’t here else she’d scold you for dirty thoughts,” Maria chimes in.

Karanos shoots us a dubious expression. “I was just taking a guess because Ian’s hair looks extra tousled.” With a roll of his eyes, his expression returns to its stern baseline. “What does the reward you got do? I didn’t ask before.”

I frown. Reward? “I didn’t think we got anything. Maria and I searched around for a bit but nothing stuck out to us.” Besides, Karanos warned us ahead of time that we probably wouldn’t receive anything valuable because of his presence.

Maria nudges me. “Wait, Ian–the dagger.”

I hold it up in front of me. “This is a reward from the plane? We found it at the beginning.”

“Does it exhibit any special properties?” Karanos asks.

“It...” I view my reflection in the dagger’s blade and it appears normal, unlike the grotesque back in the plane. “It had the ability to warp reality.” I angle it down to take in the earth; the reflection is accurate.

“Try plunging it into the ground,” Maria suggests. She addresses Karanos, explaining, “It showed us an alternate version of the world in the blade’s reflection. Stabbing the blade turned possibility to reality.”

I bend down and stab the knife into the earth.

Nothing happens.

“What about if you add ascendant energy?” Karanos asks, his eyes gleaming in the light streaming down through the sparse tree branches. “That plane was a special zone–reality warped on its own. Beyond, you might need to provide a bit of power to get it working.”

“I can try that.” Concentrating, I manifest the energy around my fingers and try to direct it into the dagger. Its ornate hilt–sylvan wrought metal with glimmering inset gems–seems to suck the energy up. It reminds me of when I fed my energy to the planar crane back in that city full of regulars, my discomfort growing by the second. It feels less like I’m fueling the dagger and more like the dagger is sucking out my energy.

“Seems like there’s a large activation cost,” Karanos says in a monotone. “This might be interesting.”

One by one, the gems start to light up, illuminated from within. The hilt begins to hum, vibrating under my fingers.

“Are we sure this is safe?” I ask.

Karanos snorts. “This is the lost quadrant, Ian–nothing is safe.”

I roll my eyes. Suddenly the hilt flashes with white light. The ground immediately around the blade turns from grassy meadow to eerie gray sepulcher, the earth dry and gritty. A faded tombstone–toppled over so it rests on the ground–lies next to my feet.

“How unsettling,” Maria says, her brow furrowed in contemplation. “Seems like it does work outside of the plane after all, though I’d say its area of power is reduced.”

Karanos holds out his hand. “Mind if I try?”

“Sure.” I yank the dagger up and hand it over. The ground remains transformed, though after the dagger’s removal, I notice the earth slowly returning back to meadow, the circle of changed terrain contracting inward.

Karanos holds up the dagger. “There’s still some of your energy in here; in the blade, I can see the alternate reality Maria was talking about. This whole area is a graveyard.” He squints. “It makes me look rather odd.”

“We noticed that back in the plane,” I add. “Our reflections were distorted.”

“Did you try stabbing yourselves with the blade?”

I give Maria a questioning look.

“No, never,” Maria says, crossing her arms.

“Where’s your sense of curiosity?” Karanos tuts. The gems in the hilt begin to glow with energy, indicating that Karanos has started charging up the dagger. “I’m going to test it out.”

He slits his forearm and his skin turns dark purple and rigid. He switches the blade to his off hand and caresses the changed patch of skin.

Nodding his head, he remarks, “This reminds me of flesh shift artifacts. Those are quite rare and usually limited in their applications, and the majority don’t take in ascendant energy as a power source. Ascendant energy gives this dagger versatility.” He gives me a serious look. “This artifact is good. I’m surprised–It’s probably not going to be a deciding factor against Achemiss, but you should be able to find creative uses for it.”

“That’s a bit concerning,” Maria says. “Eternity rewards people for attempting challenges. If even with your presence we received a good artifact, it doesn’t inspire much hope for our cause.”

“Or we could just be lucky,” I retort.

Karanos twirls the blade in his hand. “Alright, going to try one last thing while we’re here. Watch your step.” He throws the blade onto the ground and a blinding light erupts out around the hilt and blade. A ripple comes over the earth, the ground shifting from grass to ashen dirt in the blink of an eye. An area around 30 feet in diameter is changed.

“Yeah, this artifact is a winner. Have fun figuring it out.” He hands it back to me and points to the open air. “The veil here isn’t especially tough; Maria, would you like to do the honors?”

She sighs and steps forward.

“The trick is in the headbutt technique,” I say.

She gives me the stink eye. “Hilarious.”

A piece of soul between my eyes facilitates the concentration of ascendant energy on my forehead. When Maria tried the same headbutt technique back on the skyscraper plane, it failed horribly–like most people, her soul is concentrated in her chest, not shredded and distributed throughout her body.

Maria isn’t a necromancer, so she can’t manipulate her soul like I can, but she can control her End Avatar–an abstraction of her ethereal body. While she normally uses it to make oaths, she can extend it to channel ascendant energy.

Eyes narrowed in concentration, she steps into a combat stance. Blue energy flickers like weak flames around her foot. It doesn’t look as impressive as when she freely covers her whole leg with ascendant energy, but the result is undeniable: she snaps her leg forward and the plane cracks like drywall. She kicks again and the veil shatters, revealing only darkness.

She frowns. “There’s no plane on the other side.”

“Indeed,” Karanos says. “We have two options: travel through the void, a task that is possible but not easy given the abilities you two possess, or use the plane compass to find a true veil vulnerability.”

“Since you’re giving us a choice, rather than just telling us to go with option two, I get the sense we should try option one,” I say.

“It’s good experience,” Maria adds. “I assume we’ll have to travel through the void eventually. What do we need to do?”

Karanos smiles coldly. “You don’t need to do anything–you’re undead. That artifact of Cayeun’s gives you human sensations, so you’d best take it off–the void is inhospitable to people.” He turns to me. “For the living, it’s a bit more complicated. Frost dragons like Sah can traverse the void because they’re built for the most inhospitable climes–magma falls and ice floes alike. The human body is unable to survive such extremes.”

“So how do descendants do it?” I wonder. I’ve been told that ascendants like Ari have ways to make themselves durable, or even nearly indestructible. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be able to travel through the void of space for a few seconds let alone an entire day. Ascendant energy seems to be the key, but I’m not sure how.

Karanos’ cold demeanor melts, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “I was wondering when you’d ask.” He holds up his arm and pulls back the sleeve of his overcoat. “Ever since we’ve entered the lost quadrant, what have you been working on?”

I stare at him blankly. “Cutting through planes?”

“Warmer. How do you cut through planes? Hard ones, where the veil resists being sundered.”

“By focusing ascendant energy on a specific point.”

“So,” Karanos says, “what’s the opposite of that? Maria?”

“Manifesting ascendant energy throughout the body,” she answers.

I’m following the thread of logic so far. “So if I spread ascendant energy throughout my body, I can reinforce it against the void. That makes sense on the surface, but how does ascendant energy let someone stay for a prolonged period of time in the abyss? People need oxygen and water.”

“Extended stays in the void invite different challenges we’re not going to get into now. The only resource you need to worry about now is air to breathe. Ian, I want you to go into the void now. It’ll be an experiment of sorts. Try whatever means you can think of to stay alive.”

Great–seems like I’ll be dying again. I hand the dagger to Maria and hold out my right arm. Like in my forehead, a piece of my soul rests near my elbow, so I can more easily focus energy into it. I charge up for a few seconds, then slam my elbow into the sky. It shatters and begins to crumble. Before the dark porthole closes up, I manifest ascendant energy around my fingers and pull the hole open, my muscles quivering from the strain.

When the portal is just large enough to crawl through, I duck down and fling myself diagonally through the opening. As I cross over to the other side, I focus on spreading the energy throughout my body, forming thin insulation over my skin.

But the energy isn’t enough to stave off the cold.

The abyssal dark is like a frigid hell. I imagine that this is what everything will look like billions of years from now, when all energy in the world is exhausted, and the final light dies out.

My eyes feel the cold most acutely. It feels like a razor across my corneas and nearly freezes my eyelids in place, the natural moisture of my eyes drying out.

I keep calm by telling myself that I’m merely submerged in cold water rather than the empty dark. In many ways the two fates aren’t dissimilar. But the differences win out, chief among them the way that I feel pressure.

In an ocean nadir, the pressure is higher than on the surface and crushes you. But in the void, the pressure is less. I feel like I’m being squeezed from the outside. I planned to hold my breath for at least a minute, but it’s like all the air I took with me has already dissipated.

This is enough, I think, frustrated. I get Karanos’ point–no use in dying over it. But the portal back to the other plane is gone. The only way back is to re-open it or perish outright. Since I’m manifesting ascendant energy all over my body, I don’t have a way to also concentrate it down enough to shatter the veil. The problem is only exacerbated by the fact that I’m trying to brainstorm solutions while on the cusp of death.

My mind grows sluggish, my perception fading. In the final moments the fear sets in. I return to the water off Godora, the same beachhead where I defeated the loop leviathan. I encountered something far worse in the real world: a platoon of practitioners specifically sent to defeat me.

Memories of waves that dwarf tsunamis fill my mind, battering me on all sides. The waves were never the problem. No–it was the insidious cold summoned by the Moon practitioners and the odd torpor inflicted by their ability to influence tidal forces between objects. They used their affinities to lock me down and kill me slowly, eroding my endurance, kiting me around. They sustained severe casualties in the process, but their well-rehearsed tactics worked.

Alone, in the dark, drunk off delirious cold thoughts, I die–just as I nearly did then.

[ want to announce that the book launch has been a success! it's been wonderful seeing new people find the story and enjoy it. ebook and audible alike have been blowing up. also, the hardcover and paperback versions are finally approved by amazon, which is awesome. amazon challenged me over whether i actually owned the book contents (lmao) so i had to whip up a legal contract between my own publishing company and lorne ryburn (kek). aka between myself and myself. as soon as i sent that contract over things proceeded quickly.

having such a successful launch would literally not have been possible without your support. i know quite a few of you decided to buy the book from the kindle store even after y'all have been supporting me here financially, while others left reviews and upvotes/kind comments on reddit to help me promote. i have no words to express how grateful i am to have such dedicated fans. luv u guys x3000

here's a link to the amazon listing for people interested in seeing how the book has been doing. on the page, it lists the overall amazon best seller ranking (absr) and the top 3 categories we're doing well in. kinda fun to click around and see what books we're next to. new releases have a huge sales advantage over older books, but most releases lack staying power long-term. brando sando books like "the way of kings" have overall excellent staying power and hover near the top of category best seller lists...but new releases still sell more copies when they first come out, since sales are always highest in the beginning. so on some lists i get to see menocht ranked above brandon sanderson books.

it's literally such a dumb thing to be proud of since it's not at all a fair comparison (his book from like 10 years ago sells as much per day as my book from 4 days ago) but it still satisfies some unspoken childhood dream. <3 ]