I am going to tell you how many times I died, and then I am going to tell you that the number does not matter, and both of those things are true.
The number, for the record, was somewhere past two hundred. I stopped being able to hold it cleanly after the first forty or so, when the deaths stopped being events and became a texture... the way rain stops being individual drops once it is heavy enough.
Porridge... Storm... Gold... Dark... Engine... Porridge...Death... Death... Death... Death...
I lived these sentences more times than I have lived any other sentence in my life, including the one about wanting to be a mage, including the one about my mother loving me, and I want you to understand I am not being dramatic when I say it became the realest thing I knew.
But here is why the number does not matter.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 3% liquid ]
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 5% liquid ]
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 9% liquid ]
It was working.
∞
I figured out the rule the way I figure out everything... by dying enough times to see the pattern under it.
I could not repeat how many times I woke up to my sister’s voice, "Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"
Then hear the cries of alarm from the camp as a storm that covered the heavens descended, and in a few seconds, the golden lightning would fall and erase me.
Waking up again with the ache of dying fresh in my mind, and the lightning descending in the next moment.
I soon realized that this lightning was not following across the loop, else its fury would have been spent by now; instead, like me, it was being refreshed, as anytime the world or whatever was running the laws of creation detected I was about to become an Adept with Creation Lightning, it strikes me down.
It took me longer than I was willing to admit that the fusion advanced when I endured. Not when I died; dying reset the damage and gave me back my body and banked whatever I’d earned. But the earning happened when I refused to allow my body and soul to be torn apart by the Tribulation lightning; this act of defiance compressed my soul under the wrath from the heavens.
Every second I kept Mortal Shell clamped over a soul the gold lightning was taking apart, every second I refused to let go while the bolts unmade me, board by board, the liquid in my Anima grew by some fraction the screen could not be bothered to show me in real time.
So the math was ugly and simple. Die fast, advance slow. Endure the full unmaking, every bolt, the arm, the jaw, the leisurely disassembly of everything I was while a sky that found me wanting took its time, advanced my ascension faster.
I want to be honest here. The first dozen times I understood that I needed to hold, I still chose fast. I would get out of the cot, walk out of my tent, and see the storm descend over the camp, and I could not make myself stand there and be slowly unmade again, so I would let Mortal Shell go and take the bolt to the skull and get the merciful version.
Three percent... Five... The coward’s pace. I am not ashamed of it. There is a kind of courage that is just being too tired to run, and I had not reached it yet.
Then I reached it.
Somewhere in there, I could not tell you which death, since they were all beginning to blur, I stood up out of the cot, looked at the sky, and did not let go of Mortal Shell.
I walked out into the dawn, and I let the first bolt take my arm, and I stayed standing. I let the second take my leg, and I stayed conscious. I let the sky disassemble me at its leisure, and I held on through every second of it, and I did the worst arithmetic a person can do, which is to choose the longer pain because the longer pain is the one that gets you home.
There were screams all around me, most especially from Bari and Dara; they did not understand what was happening, nor why I could stand when my body was being torn apart by lightning... Maybe it was a good thing that everything went back the way it was, because in some of the times I had died, I was cursing the heavens.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 14% liquid ]
That death bought four percent.
∞
The lightning taught me, too. That is the part I did not expect; however, it was a testament to how much I was suffering that it took me so long to grab hold of this obvious truth in the midst of my tribulation.
I am lightning, folks. I have been becoming lightning for seventeen loops and however many deaths, and it turns out that when a sky spends two hundred deaths striking you with the stuff, you learn its grammar whether you want to or not.
The tribulation’s gold was not like mine; it was heavier, and what I would describe as more certain, the difference between a knife and a verdict. This lightning understood its purpose better than I understood my life at this point, and this was the first time I had ever considered the elements as aware, and I should see lightning more than just bolts of electrified plasma.
But at the end of the day, it was still lightning, and lightning has rules, and I have spent my whole death-soaked existence learning the rules of lightning, all the way from Spark.
By the hundredth death, I knew the bolt before it fell. By the hundred-and-fiftieth, I could feel where it would strike a half-second early, the way you feel a sneeze coming.
And somewhere past that, lying in the ash with no face and no leg and my soul rising off me like silver smoke, I stopped bracing against the bolts.
I started listening to them.