[MA] 143. Ever Again (Patreon)

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[A/N: 2/3 this week. Next one tomorrow (Sunday) or Tuesday.]

Shen had been ready to die, but then the world changed.

It didn't get brighter or darker, nothing new appeared in his field of view, and space and time weren't affected. Yet, everything was different for him.

Feng Shen was himself again.

He had a moment, a split second, to parse everything that happened to him. His eyes filled with tears as he rolled to the side, dodging multiple projectiles and spells while getting hit by others.

The pain and suffering caused by the attacks that hit him felt right, fitting after what he had done to so many people.

He was almost tempted to just... die. He lived and was willing to die for his honor, yet that honor had been shredded to bits, turned into a mockery of its former form.

Shen...

Shen would leave those considerations for later. What he had done on Earth didn't change that he was being attacked by betrayers of the Alliance.

Well, the system could lie—it had lied to him. But he would assume that these gnolls had communed with the enemy that wanted to destroy Earth and thus were his enemies too.

He was surprised to find himself fully healed and with a dantian full of qi. He also felt some kind of hollowness inside him, but he had no time to investigate.

Shen used his footwork with D+ agility and a body filled with qi. It felt different to use a martial technique with his mind back to being truly his. He was faster and defter, able to truly understand and apply the knowledge the Skills level-ups had provided him with.

He had been in the middle of a circle of gnolls. He ran, dodged, jumped, and used his spear only to protect himself.

In a few moments, he was back to the front line, a dozen yards away from the nearest gnoll. The other armies had approached, but around one mile squared was still empty in the middle of them.

Unfortunately, that wasn't far enough to get away from a monolith's area of influence. Moreover, the white cubes flew against him immediately, and the other projectiles kept coming.

Shen didn't mind.

He needed just a few moments of true respite to think of what truly mattered: his aura.

He had been ordered to "go kill, and don't stop until you've developed your aura." He had almost formed an aura yet been stopped by whatever spell Valentina had used against him. When that happened, the small sane part of himself, the one that had seen everything yet could do nothing to change it, had gotten very angry at the treachery. She had told him that he could free himself from the spell by doing something that the spell prevented him from accomplishing!

But now that Shen was back to himself and could fully utilize his learning ability and senses, he thought there was more to it than a mere lie.

In fact, Valentina might not have lied in her command at all; it might have contained a way for him to stop killing. However, she called herself a superior being.

So, maybe what she called an aura was different from what he did.

To Shen, an aura was the constant externalization of someone's Concept, a way to passively affect Reality all the time. If he believed that was the truth, he would've been prevented from reaching it.

However, what if an aura was something more to Valentina?

He had attempted to develop an aura in two different ways; that was evidence that it was possible to accomplish it in more than one way. What if he had just been doing it in the wrong manner? Or at least in a subpar fashion that the spell considered invalid?

In his first attempt, Shen had wanted to cheat. He had wanted to use his Foundational Qi to push Reality back so firmly that he would carve a temporary hole in it. Then, he would fill the gap with his Foundational Concept. He was confident he could do that with enough willpower.

Valentina's spell had disagreed with that way of forming an aura and changed his mind, turning him into little more than an animal.

Thus came his second attempt, using his body as an anchor for his Concept to constantly affect reality. Although it was using his body, Shen considered that an attempt of his mind instead. His mind had been entirely in sync with the Spear; he had become one with the Law of the Spear, though by emptying himself instead of by understanding it. Only then had he become a medium for three of its Concepts to constantly affect Reality.

When his self ceased to be, he became the manifestation of his Foundational Concept in Reality.

That's when Valentina's spell had acted again, and this time, it pushed her toward his own death. Now, he wondered if that wasn't just another mechanism to help him develop an aura properly instead of just petty revenge.

And to be fair, now that he had survived, he had found a better way to do it.

When he had been cut from his secondary Concepts in this rift, he had comprehended better than ever how he was his Path. Ironically, his mind, pushed toward aggression by the Guardian System and Valentina's command, couldn't fully utilize that realization.

Well, maybe it was on purpose, and she wanted him to just die, after all.

Either way, now that Shen was back to himself, the simplest way to form an aura came to him almost instinctively.

He was his Path, and his Path was also Reality. His Path's Concepts were simultaneously part of him and the Laws of Reality. So, in a way, Shen was Reality.

The only thing separating him from it was his will.

His will had been part of both his previous ideas on how to form an aura. The first idea involved using willpower used to supersede Reality. The second was obliterating his will, so it stopped separating him from Reality. The answer was in the middle, in balance, in harmony.

Shen was Reality. He didn't need to force his will into it or stop being himself for that to turn truer. Shen just had to... accept it. Open himself to Reality and let it flow through him and back without losing himself.

Shen was War, and War was all around him.

Shen was Combat, and Combat was part of his every movement.

Shen was Sharpness, and Sharpness was in his mind and the blade of his weapon.

He was all that. The War around him, the Combat inside him and his enemies, the Sharpness in his mind and weapon. He didn't just use those things; he was them.

Until now, he had separated himself from them, kept them partly isolated into his Path.

But not anymore.

Maybe the humiliation he had gone through helped with that too. Shen had realized he wasn't special, unique, or even worthy of anything, much less taking part of Reality for himself and claiming it was separated from everything else. Shen was just one more, another gear of the uncaring machine of existence, another speck of dust in the cosmos, another living being among uncountable others.

He was just a tiny part of Reality, and Reality was him.

That was it. It was that simple. A shift in perspective, an opening of his heart to something grander, the acceptance of his commonness.

Shen's will spread over his surroundings, his weird War-Combat-Sharpness mix constantly flowing from the Laws of the Spear into him and from him into the area around him.

To be near him was to feel the weight of his Foundational Concept all the time. His aura was almost like the bubble of Foundational Qi that he could use around him to impose his will against Reality, except on a smaller area and much weaker.

He could make himself stronger, his weapon sharper, and strategize better than normal without spending any energy. It wasn't to the point of what he could accomplish with qi, but it was already an enormous advantage.

On a twenty-foot area, he would be able to output ten percent of the power he could with qi. Also, if Shen used qi in that area now, it would become ten percent stronger, as it added to his aura's power.

Yet, his other ideas on how to form an aura weren't wasted.

As the Concepts flowed into him, Shen pushed more of his will onto them. He broke harmony to take a dominant position over them. And as his mind became a funnel, he also moved the Concepts into his body and used it as a kind of relay station to exponentially increase his aura's effects. The result was more than the sum of the parts.

His aura's quality improved, and its range increased—enormously.

Within a hundred feet around him, Shen could use his Foundational Concepts to affect Reality up to thirty percent of what he could accomplish only with qi. And if he used qi in that area, it would get a thirty-percent strength bonus.

His Battle Sense also became much more potent inside his aura. Shen frowned and turned to one side, where he felt someone. He saw a humanoid silhouette there for a moment. It ran away quickly, but he was sure of what he had felt and seen.

But more importantly, his aura could do the same as his mastered Foundational Concept. Though it couldn't push against Reality as well, it could significantly weaken any attack approaching him. That alone was enough to give him a better chance of survival.

Yet Shen wasn't done; Shen was Zephyr and Flow too.

Despite the cost paid in blood, Shen had significantly improved his understanding of all his Concepts. The insights that pushed Zephyr and Flow to the last step before mastery were now much better understood by his whole mind.

Zephyr was the soft, gentle breeze of the Wind.

To Shen, it meant the minute corrections in his movements, the softness of finding a way around a challenging obstacle rather than forcing his way through it, the gentleness of his relaxed muscles before they contracted at the exact moment to maximum power output.

Flow was the steady and continuous movement of Water in a current.

In itself, the Concept was never-ending, never-breaking. If corralled, it shrunk but kept going. If given space, it expanded.

To Shen, it was the fluidity of his every movement, the continuity of his existence, the healthiness of his very bloodstream.

When mastering War, Combat, and Sharpness, Shen had been stuck at 93% and required a great insight to take the last step. However, with Zephyr and Flow, the accumulated learnings of the past days came together to effortlessly push him that last mile now that his mind was entirely his.

The monoliths still prevented Shen from using those secondary Concepts, but they couldn't stop Reality from pushing information into Shen's mind. They were also not enough to stop him from making those mastered Concepts part of his aura. Likewise, they couldn't disconnect his aura from him.

Like that, Shen found a loophole in the gnolls' plan. In those one hundred feet, he became able to use thirty percent of the effects of what he could accomplish with his Zephyr and Flow Qi—or, to be more precise, with his mastered Zephyr and Flow Qi.

He didn't have the chance to put those mastered Concepts to full use, but it was enough that he could use them at all. In his current situation, he would at least be able to dodge projectiles much better and work against the spells targeting him.

The aura was his, yet it was also a kind of condensation of a part of Reality itself. So, although it was connected to his will, using it against spells didn't require his will to clash against others. It became as if Reality itself was acting on the spells.

That let him weaken the magic thrown at him. Better yet, the two extra Concepts in his aura made it more effective at acting against undesired spells. It was like gaining extra arrows to shoot at an enemy.

He felt strong.

Yes, Shen had been pushed to the brink of death. He had lost himself. He would definitely suffer for that when he had the time.

But he had survived, and he had grown more powerful for it.

The white cubes were approaching. Shen could destroy them more easily than before, but it would still waste too much qi. He wouldn't fight like an idiot anymore.

He rushed toward the closest gnoll with his spear held firmly in his hand.

One day, Valentina would pay for what she had forced Shen to do. But today, he would settle for teaching the gnolls not to cut anyone's retreat path ever again.

A cornered animal with nothing to lose fought the hardest.

[A/N: Round two, fight!]

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