From the drag patterns, their bodies looked like they had been dragged away at high speed. Based on the impact splatters, what had killed them hadn’t been the attack so much as the journey into the dark depths themselves. Sharp turns through rough caverns left many walls stained sanguine, and the sharp tips of stalagmites and stalactites were considered responsible for anyone that may have aggressively bounced their way down the tunnel network.
What exactly had done the dragging was unknown. No footprints marred the flawless streak patterns and impact stains. People hadn’t done this. A thing had grabbed everyone down here, likely one at a time, then dragged them with force and velocity to their graves like a kraken pulling a ship into the depths of the ocean.
Jiivra sat defeated on a stair step, the great majority of a frightened student body huddled nearby. Her Aura emitted a faint light, having just taken over from a few of the fire students too exhausted to keep their illumination active. They’d run out of torches an hour ago, and their planned supplies were soaked beyond the point of usability.
The way out was barred by a landslide, not that they could have used it. Even now they could hear pick and bone nick and peck at the makeshift blockage. It was only a matter of time before the tireless undead made their way through. They didn’t know exactly how long they had, they just knew they were tired, didn’t have the planned supplies, and had failed everyone they’d pushed down here.
Only a few of the students managed to speak. Even then, it was in short supply since the drab mood cut short their willingness to speak. They were responsible for leading an entire town down here. They’d been so sure it was safe; so certain. Nothing bad had ever happened during explorations! This was an abandoned cave system.
They’d never guessed that there was a lurker with an appetite sizable enough to consume the entire populace. Why hadn’t they known? They should have known! The realizations were eating away at them, and their instructors didn’t have any way to make them feel better. They were all equally responsible as far as they saw it, and they too blamed themselves.
Astrea frowned and lifted her head. There was a tingle in her ear. Speaking wasn’t a popular option, but the buzzing only got louder. Closer. “Does anyone hear that?”
A groan erupted en masse from the huddled air Essence students, and the head boy spoke in a monotone. “We hear the undead slowly clawing their way in, yes. Hard not to hear with how quiet it is in here.”
Astrea dismissed the snarky retort. “Not the ticking, the buzzing. The crinkling of paper that is just getting louder and louder?”
Alexandria perked up at the mention of paper. That was her playhouse, and she pressed her hands around her ears to make them bigger. She squinted, thinking that would make her hearing better. It didn’t, but it lifted the corners of many a mouth that spotted her antics, making them forget for just a moment how awfully cold it was down here.
The tiny librarian shook her head, she couldn’t hear anything. It made the students grit their teeth until Jiivra shot up sporting a similar frown. She reached out to Astrea, trying to match information. “Crinkling paper that pops and then gets wet?”
Alexandria pouted at being left out. Glaring between the two older girls, she again tried to squint-listen. Agitation struck her as again she heard nothing. She was being played with by the tall-sisters! Not fair! A few of the Skyspear students stood, copying the librarian’s ear-cupping attempt. Still, they also heard nothing and instead sent a questioning look at the highest-ranked master and… the plus one. How was the newbie doing something they couldn't? This was either a pitiful attempt at a distraction, or a joke in poor taste.
The cave lit up in a flash as crackling plasma light hurled its way through the open space like a bulldozing rhino with its tail on fire. It left a bioluminescent moss carpet that rapidly grew in its wake. It sucked up the moisture clinging to the cavern walls to sustain itself after the sudden accelerated growth, and the albino foliage crinkled as miniscule roots dug ever-so-barely into the rock to hold itself in place.
Students gawked in bewilderment, whispering mumbles between them that shared the same uncertain tones of confusion. That confusion intermingled with a spark of hope as Jiivra punched the air hard enough for her fist to create a *thud* by compressing the air. “Yes! Chalk one up for Skyspear, not all is lost!”
Jiivra’s smile was wide, and the only one returning it was an equally excited Astrea. They both deduced that there were limited sources which could pull off that oddball effect. The remaining student body got to their feet with a hastened heartbeat as they picked up the details from the conversing pair.
Astrea proudly pressed her fists into her hips. “Grandfather lives! That’s good news for everyone. I’d say that pulse was a good indication he’s snapped out of whatever mental quagmire he was stuck in on the way. Though I’ll admit I have no idea what the effect was supposed to accomplish. A means of telling us there’s a fighting chance? I’ll take that as a ‘crack on’!”
Jiivra dropped her illumination effect. The cavern was visible enough with the new low-light. Unfortunately, it also let everyone see more paths where bodies had been dragged. The difference was that more popular paths were no longer obscured, and it was easy to tell by the sheer amount of viscera and ‘paint’ which cavern tunnel became the most likely candidate to find the culprit.
The celestial combat instructor wasn’t convinced. “Did our old man do this? Probably. Do I know what it means? No. This never came up in the discussions, and I don’t even know what the intent is.”
Her Essence-cycled eyes scanned the surroundings, but she didn’t grasp any hidden meanings. “A pulse of heavy celestial to be sure. It revitalized plant life that previously thrived here, which I can safely guess is the moss. The conditions are good for it. There seems to be a change in what it’s supposed to do though. Because… well… it’s glowing.”
Astrea had a sudden memory of something her Elder had said well over a decade ago. She parroted his words and took a deft few steps closer to the wall for her own inspection. “Don’t eat the glowing moss.”
She received some looks that wordlessly said ‘duh’, including one from Alexandria. Even she’d read that it was a dumb idea to eat things that seemed unnatural or weren’t properly prepared. That’s how you got the screams. It’s what people did shortly after they ate something they shouldn’t have and rushed to the latrine. Don’t eat weird things. Don’t get the screams. Easy.
“I know I heard it, the wave passed, and I felt incredibly uncomfortable as it bounced off me and shot back.” Astrea shrugged at the nonverbal reply from her surroundings. “*Erghh*. It took a chunk out of my cultivation too. Oh, that just feels awful.”
She wrapped her arms around her stomach at the realization. Groaning internally as she kept her complaints to herself, though the momentary discomfort was a good uptick in the general mood of the students. Their head instructor hadn’t been too fond of the newbie when they’d first brought her up, and the gossip that she was an infernal cultivator reflected poorly on the daughter of the Fringe.
Astrea didn’t care about any of that. She had just pulled herself together when Jiivra softly held her shoulder. “How are you feeling, and can you tell me more about what you mean with ‘bounced back’? I didn’t feel that at all.”
The infernal cultivator nodded, having an idea or two. “You said the majority of that pulse was celestial? Well, I don’t need to know two sticks can make a fire to figure out that was not great for me.”
Soft pats followed on Astrea’s back, and the students were a little confused. Didn’t they dislike each other? Those who remembered their flirtatious fighting outside of the cave said nothing, distracted by their need for answers and direction. Abyss if they knew what to do or what that pulse meant. “You’re alright…”
The infernal cultivator nodded. She was, and Jiivra’s support went a long way. “Bounced back. I mean directly. That pulse thing hit me, shaved off a chunk of my cultiva
tion, and repelled off and away from me like it was one of those rubber tree-sap orbs the kids started dropping down the Skyspear steps. You didn’t feel that?”
Jiivra shook her head ‘no’. “Nothing of the sort, if anything it went right through me.”
A few of the boys snickered but went ignored. The celestial instructor decided it was time to crowdsource for information. She turned and spoke with her usual militant poise. The school snapped to attention and without being prompted arranged themselves into a square formation. Fun and games were over when certain voice tones came out to play. No amount of feeling diminished was going to allow them to get one over on their combat instructor; she was still a C-ranker.
In fact, her rank was popular gossip material. According to the most reliable sources they had, it was supposed to take significantly longer to hit the C-ranks. On the mountaintop, their instructor simply had all the conditions working in her favor. Not only was she the prime source for connecting celestial Essence during her chants, but she was the prime benefactor. As a Master, she could cultivate unrestricted. Just about all of the Essence type the area gathered was hers to claim.
With a wide and consistent support network of students, her daily needs were seen to with advanced frequency. Most of all, it was a popular topic that she didn’t have their dual-ring cultivation technique. The students all had a ‘containment ring’ and a ‘cultivation ring’. One trapped their corruption until they could find a suitable means to get rid of it, while the other allowed them proper cultivation progress.
Their celestial instructor didn’t just have rings, but a cultivation technique personally constructed by the Headmaster. A lower grade copy of his own, significantly advanced method. While it had taken their Headmaster five years to recover from Echoing… Jiivra had spent those years gathering her power.
Not spending it on improvements, or Essence techniques, or infusion, or Aura building. Nothing except gather, and gather, and gather as the sun-Core refined her celestial Essence as fast as she could take it in. That technique was designed to take a multitude of Essences and refine them all at the same time.
Having it focused on a single affinity spiked the efficiency. Jiivra innately grasped the difference between her prior fractal and this new, three-dimensional method. On a surface level it looked deceptively simple. Yet, the method moved in ways that you just didn’t expect, and the complexity and nuances involved an entire category of difficulty higher than what she was used to.
A twenty-split fractal was easier than this, and she’d gotten to thirty-plus before the Vicars had stripped her of power. Jiivra was pulling in celestial Essence as hard and fast as she’d been able, and the cultivation technique might as well have been relaxing on a beach with a coconut drink in hand. The only reason she managed to handle the technique was due to its nature. Unlike her prior fractal technique, the gyroscope balanced itself.
Starting and stopping was the hard part, since it would pull in passive gain when you didn’t want it to unless you really put effort into clamping it shut. Though, even with all of that, nobody knew the real secret of how she was breaking through the ranks so fast.
Jiivra clapped her hands now that she had everyone’s attention. “This is what we’re going to do.”
Chapter Four
Artorian saw a ring of light return to his position through the illuminating moss, bouncing back from one of the tunnels right above him that he couldn’t conveniently get to. The bioluminescent moss didn’t faze the Blight. It was too weak and too minor, and based on the absolute lack of response from the unpleasant shapeless mass… it hadn’t noticed the extra bit. Artorian spoke with bemused wit. “We’re going to play a game!”
“The game is how long it takes you to figure out what mistakes you made. Without me telling you, at least until it’s too late. I will, however, give you a clue when you ask for it.”
Cataphron started beating a dead horse. Specifically, using one of the bodies of a Jian resident. Mostly out of sheer frustration, as at every turn this delusional, irritating fogey worked around his decade-long plan. The old man was supposed to run, to attempt to flee and hide. He was supposed to discover that no path he could take led to his freedom. No path led to salvation. All paths would lead the codger right back to him.
Upholding this first-person viewpoint was difficult. He slipped into sentences with ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, and the twinkle in the old man’s eye was dangerous. That idiot-pulse had been harmless, but it had confirmed something both of them had been uncertain of: the land-law only worked while the Blight was Cataphron. When enough mind, similarity, and identity was invoked to trick the vow into believing the soul of Cataphron still belonged to the original body, rather than a mimicry.
*Crunch*
The Blight snapped its considerable omnidirectional vision to the old man. Once again, confection crumbs flaked from the sides of his cheeks, marring the edge of his lips as another ‘cookie’ had come from nowhere to be consumed. The man was supposed to eat the flesh of the fallen! To fall into despair! The Blight was seething for satisfaction.
How did this field mouse have so much food on him? Artorian crunched the delicious cookie, swallowing with a wide smile before thumbing the corners of his mouth to lick them clean. A very thin and veiled starlight Aura surrounded him, excessively cleaning without harm to the Blight. The identity slider had been completely moved to ‘cleaning’ with a little leeway for ‘light’. Not enough to harm his adversary, but certainly enough to annoy the deathly abyss out of it.
Artorian had spent years honing his ability to get under Cataphron’s skin in letter format, and easy decades of consistent sass practice. The cherry on top? He was living and doing this purely out of spite; purely to aggrieve and annoy an entity that likely wasn’t even from this world. Just to stick it to ‘em. Artorian knew that his survival was… unlikely.
The *ping* he got back let him know some of his students had survived, unfortunately he didn’t know who, or how many. Just that they had. Since the ping had returned, the effect must have reached them. Though that wasn’t the intent of his little… charade.
The truth was in the moss. Artorian didn’t know it, but his Fringe-daughter had been absolutely right on the gold coin: Blighty here was a glutton. It liked to eat! Eventually, it was going to eat some of the moss in counter-spite. Artorian knew it would. It would think of it eventually as a way to get back at a creature it couldn’t touch, since it wanted so badly to see him suffer. Specifically, suffer slowly.
If the Blight dropped the entire sadism routine, and went after him in earnest… then it could not do so while maintaining the method by which it was somehow holding the land-law vow together. Much like the armor that was currently still of no use to him. Artorian just didn’t have a good grasp on how the blazing heavens that worked. Why did land-laws even work at all? How does a patch of ground have the ability to punish someone for breaking a promise or oath?
That just didn’t make any sense, because that’s not how it worked in the Fringe. He knew well how rites of land ownership functioned, but not abyss-blasted why.
Cataphron spat back at him. “Burn you and your games.”
Artorian raised a brow. “You’re hurt by fire… I’m surprised to hear you make such a comment.”
The Blight infesting Cataphron’s body reeled unnaturally. Cracking the spine to bend the body in twisted ways before aligning it to face Artorian with sickening pops. “No, I’m not. I’m immune to that annoyance called fire. It’s just a distraction. A dumb. Paltry. Minute. Irritating distraction. I care not for any temperature. I don’t feel it. I care not for the damage their extremes supposedly accomplish. They don’t function against me. Of all the compound Essences, there are but two that have ever given me any thoughts of doubt. Once you are dead, none will remain in this world.”
Sagely nodding was the old man’s reply, a mystery cookie pressed between his fingers. He spoke with flat snark, but played it off like he meant his wor
ds. “Oh. Well, then. My sincere apologies. I never realized I was in the presence of such greatness.”
Cataphron threw his arms into the air as the untenable mass above him shifted with bubbling agreement. “Finally, some sense!”
An idea struck the philosopher, and he stowed the cookie for now. He had planned to take a loud, interruptive bite at whatever the response was going to be… but something better came to mind. “Ah, well. Yes, I suppose I should have noticed earlier. I didn’t really make the connection before now. I did see a high ranked Mage throw power at you, and it did… well, it did nothing. Given such invulnerability, I shouldn’t be surprised by an entity that’s two hundred years old.”
The Blight recoiled as if it had been grievously insulted. The entire room shifted as smooth shadows became jagged and edged. Some even creased and dug dimpled lines into the moss-coated wall. So, shadows could become solid? Good to know!
The room, rather than Cataphron, replied. “Two hundred? You wound me with your poor estimations. I am no wet-eared whelp. I am two thousand years into my glorious eternity. I am from the peak, the pinnacle, the apex of the Golden Age.”
Cataphron’s body stilled, and Artorian was hard pressed not to test an attack. It was too likely that was a ruse, a purposeful moment of weakness to eke out an aggressive response that would spur his own demise. Cataphron’s neck cracked and his face did a full-moon turn to regard him, sad to see there was no flicker in the old man’s Aura.
Artorian let out a calming exhale. Close call. He’d nearly done it. Best to pry a little more. “Two thousand! My word, were you ever human? Or always… actually I’m not sure what you are. We’ve just been calling you whatever comes to mind at the time.”
“Whatever comes…!” Cataphron pressed his undead hand to his chest, appalled once more. “What do you mean you do not know of me? I exist in every history book, every folk tale, and every dreadful story mortals use to still their children at night. I, the eternal transcended of the dark. Wondrous, vast, and all-reaching. There is nowhere my tendrils do not spread, no underdark my bleakness does not tread.”
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