The challenger presented their manaprint and full mana capacity, laying their soul bare. Core mana answered the invitation irresistibly, seeking equilibrium with the surrounding ambience, almost like osmosis. The response created a rift stitched from the challenger’s mana and an equal amount of core mana: a Mana Trial.
The Sage could deny the challenge at the cost of losing that amount of core mana back into the world. Or they could accept and then either slay or subjugate the challenger. The challenger only had death to choose from: theirs or the Sage’s. And once the Sage’s inscription released, they still had to inscribe the core truth into their own soul before the trial’s mana burned out.
Whatever core truth this Sage held, it dismantled energy grids, water channels, and trade routes on a whim, hollowing out entire communities long before he ever stepped onto this sand.Territories that did not submit were cut from their infrastructures, and those that did soon couldn’t afford to maintain the dependence, ending in the same ruin. Entire regions destabilized under his force.
Those who physically opposed were slaughtered, suddenly finding their elementals and skills substantiating into nothing in front of the Sage. Challengers never survived, yet he always left witnesses to spread the tale of his power--a skill that severed the connection between person and nature, inscription and call, overwhelming every affinity.
Overall, not a bad deal for anyone hungry for an S-skill, if the alternative was waiting two lifetimes for a Soul Rift to form. And an excellent deal for anyone intent on killing a Sage and their familiar, especially those fed up with how Sages utilized their power. One would just have to be not entirely well to challenge a Sage, eagerly trying to claim a death wish.
Zhoumin stood as one, sick of something that had yet to be diagnosed.
Before him were two. The familiar laid unmoving. The Sage collapsed face-down, the part of his chest that should have held his heart blasted clear out, edges singed black with charcoal. Not sure why that killed him, since that would imply the cavity ever held a heart.
Zhoumin grabbed at his ribs, applying pressure to hold in the throbbing to keep himself upright.
The ringing in his ears gave him a crash course in the Doppler effect, circling his skull and cutting in and out as his peripheral vision blurred. The taste of iron grew stronger with each heartbeat. The dread fostered a sense that he was dying, which surprisingly felt more oriented than passing out. As if the body worked a little harder to stay conscious when it knew there wouldn’t be a day after.
Wait, focus. There were two dead bodies he had to deal with right now; not time to be waxing poetic.
Zhoumin shifted over to the familiar first. The familiar lay stiff in front of him, splayed over jagged stalagmites of frozen mud and sand that pierced through his abdomen and shoulder. A muddy green haze lingered over it, the same hue as his emerald eyes, now dull and frozen open. It took a bit of time for mana to completely vacate a corpse, like how warmth lingered.
He thrust his hand into the aura evaporating from the flesh, drawing it in with his own mana, manipulating the aether into the barrier beside them. Black tendrils protruded out of the void and greedily took in the mana, wrapping and writhing around his hand in a feeding frenzy, consuming it to continue upholding the rift that encapsulated them for the Mana Trial.
He’d thought the familiar was a funny guy, though not enough to care to remember anything the man had said before the trial, just there had been a lot of it. A notorious alchemist with a brash personality that matched his large frame and long record. He boasted the most missions completed for an A-Class Alchemist before and during his run as a familiar. And now he looked plain, kinda shabby, the last of him amounting to only about twenty more minutes of rift maintenance.
His last memory was of the Sage shoving him aside to save himself. Did that count as dying alone? Or something lonelier. This was the fate of familiars: bind your soul to some warmongering asshole only to be pushed to your death, so he could die right after. Well deserved.
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The Sage’s carcass lay a few feet behind him. Blood drained from him, spilling dark across the sand. His flesh caved inward, scorched skin shriveling against sharp ribs. He mummified rapidly as his vitality was pulled out thread by thread. Each line rising from the body was scribed with glyphs, glowing prismatically as they swirled upward. The threads danced erratically as they released. One became dozens, their radiance a sharp contrast to the body they were stripping down to husk and bone. The cost of a soul inscription.
Zhoumin lowered himself beside the familiar, palming his scalp and twisting the head to reach the back of the neck where a sigil lingered. The familiar was already cold to the touch.
He had gotten what he came for; the objective was two bodies. He hadn’t planned what to do about the soul inscription— he hadn’t planned much of anything beyond the killing. Whatever came after was a problem he’d left to the version of himself who somehow survived. A window flashed before him.
SYSTEM NOTIFICATION
A Soul Core has been detected. ( ?°?°) !!
Unraveling is now in progress.
A Soul Inscription is available for integration. Would you like to inscribe it into your soul?
[Yes] [No]
He had eighteen minutes to think about it.
His mana bled into the familiar’s soulbound sigil sluggishly, testing its response to the streams of glyphs coiling overhead. A metallic taste rose. Blood pooled against his tongue as his vision blurred to obscurity. He shut his eyes and focused instead on sensation: mana entering the sigil, aether churning through the enclosed dome, black void past it. Shapes formed in soundless rhythm, color weighted against motion. Within that synesthesia, the familiar’s sigil glowed faintly blue.
As the last of the inscription left the husk, even his bones disintegrated into motes that muddled with sand. The soul inscription writhed, iridescent skin overlapping loops of glyphs that orbited one another in jagged swarms. Their movement was deafening without sound, static blaring against his senses.
But within the mess, the blue glow remained— strands woven through the prism he could manipulate. He hadn’t wanted a soul inscription. But its glow pulled him in like a moth. The core mana scribbled chaotically through the air, but taken together, illustrated an intoxicating allure. An orchestra a few beats off, asking for a conductor.
Whether it was the charisma of a core truth or his ego insisting he could wield it, he couldn’t tell. As his body drifted closer, the ache in his chest dulled, the ringing softened, the call of power promised relief. He selected his option on the System Notification.
Pain surged instantly. The threads honed in, alerted to their prey, their new vessel. They shot into his arm, threaded needles burning as they sewed up his skin, leaving embroideries of inscription. He fell to one knee, and where it touched the sand, glyphs leeched upward along his leg, coursing through his veins. The soul inscription swept through his nervous system like wildfire.
Zhoumin forced breath through clenched teeth, fighting the tremor in his hands. He gathered his will around the blue threads in the turbulent waves of inscription, carefully selecting their aether, coaxing them to move with the flow of his own mana. One by one, he ripped their seams from his skin and wove them into cohesive spins of inscription. He guided them from his arm, searing them across his veins, crossed into his chest, winded it all toward his own core—his gem heart—isolating it around one nucleus. The caught inscription beat against him, running countercurrent across his senses, threatening to shatter his heart.
But with a base to wind onto, he worked faster. He isolated colors from the prism, tore each from his flesh to reorganize, and coiled them back around his core before the pattern overtook him. Each strand took minutes to anchor, bursting veins and scraping his skin raw over the hour, until at last the core condensed into a sphere of soft luminous light around his own, warm against the void’s backdrop.
Zhoumin’s body gave way. He collapsed forward, clutching his chest in trembling hands, gasping into the ground. It was beautifully invasive, fierce, and ecstatic all at once, its aether so incredibly clear crystalline, radiating with the faint hum of eternity, whispering an incomprehensible truth into his heart.
Mana poured back into his veins, bloating past replenishment, past his capacity, forcing his heart to swell to the point he thought it might burst. The veins in his eyes ruptured one by one, yet his vision sharpened through the bloodshot center. His periphery failed to return, leaving him with the sensation of being surrounded by murky water.
Around him, the void churned, distorting the air. From the zenith of the dome downward, the black void fractured into shards, each one dissolving into ambient mana that settled into the night sky as stars.
As Zhoumin tilted his head up to glimpse the first cut of dawn, text burned across his sight, stark and absolute:
[System Notification]
You have won the Mana Trial.
Reward:
- Skill: Nullification (S)
- Skill: Soulbind (S)
- Status: Soul Inscription (S)
- Stat Boost: Core Mana (S)
now for the third way to become a sage—
I've been abroad on/off for a few months now so writing time hasn't been plentiful (? —?—)