The Hollow Avatar had told me that the tribulation was a test.
Well, I had done a lot of tests in my life, especially at the Academy, so I knew that tests could be studied and prepared for.
Pushing aside the horror of being taken apart by lightning, I was listening hard enough to know that the gold lightning was not random.
I don’t know if there was any intelligence guiding it, but all I understood was that this lightning was precise. It struck the places where my Anima was fusing fastest, where I think my body was weakest.
The fusion was not only happening in my Anima Depth, since I learned that if I spread out my Anima all over my body, I could also endure more lightning strikes while giving my Anima time to fuse.
I mapped the strikes. The left side of my chest, the base of my spine, the hollow behind my left ear, the webbing between my right thumb and forefinger, the soft spot behind my knee.
These were the places where my body was transforming Anima more quickly than in others because those were the positions with thicker clusters of my new, transformed channels.
Cor Telluris had focused on these spots when it was recreating my channels, and these were the places where the world’s immune system was targeting me.
So, if I could somehow reinforce them, then it might be possible to survive for much longer.
More lightning descended, and I died.
Damn, this test was really hard... so I guess I had to listen even harder. Not many would have the chance to retake a difficult test over and over again, and even if I don’t know the answers, with enough wrong inputs, I may stumble on the right choice.
I kept listening, and soon enough, I could hear that the gold lightning and the channels the Third Gate had blown through me were asking each other the same question.
The bolt came down to unmake the liquid Creation-Anima because the world would not hold it. The channels had been built to carry Creation-Anima, because that is what Cor Telluris, created by the Hollow Avatar, had made them for.
This tribulation was trying to tear the ocean out of a vessel that was, fraction by agonising fraction, becoming the kind of vessel that could hold an ocean.
The tribulation was not just a test; with the loop, it could also forge me, in the same way that Cor Telluris was forging my channels.
Every bolt that unmade me was also, if I held still and let it, hammering the channels into something that could one day take a bolt like that and not come apart.
The sky thought it was deleting me. It was, with every strike, building the exact thing it was trying to delete.
I wonder if the heavens knew what they were helping to create, but I knew what I was becoming, and from the moment I knew it, I stopped dying to escape the lightning and started dying to finish it.
∞
The engine was the part that frightened me, and I do not frighten the way I used to.
I wanted to ignore it, but I was dying so quickly that it was almost impossible for me to shut it out.
A part of me tried to find the humor in all of this, and I failed.
Every death, I felt myself entering the engine, and heard its continent-sized grinding of every shattered piece of me. And every death, I was a little more awake inside it, because my soul was a little more liquid, a little more sensitive, a little more there even in the unmaking. And what I felt, the further in I got, was that the engine was working harder than it had been built to.
My soul was transforming into something stronger than this world was able to contain, and it seemed that this transformation was straining the unknown mechanism that was bringing me back to life.
I will choose my words carefully, because this is the thing I understood and cannot prove.
A clean death, a sword, a fall, a demon, gives the engine a soul to put back together, and it does, and it is, I think, easy work for a thing the size of a continent. But the tribulation does not kill me. It unmakes me, scatters me wider than death scatters anyone, and every time, the engine had to reach further to gather the pieces, and every time it took a fraction longer, and every time the recording at the wake came back a little more wrong.
It also did not help that my soul was not normal; it was not just Celestial; it was welded to the Hollow Avatar, and I don’t know if a soul like that could even be classified as a soul any longer.
Time and Reality seemed to be straining at the edge every time I woke.
"Up, up, lazy cur... my throat is getting tired of shouting the same freaking thing every time!"
I looked at the alarm in shock. Was my mind breaking, or was reality itself protesting the fact that my existence was breaking too many rules?
The lightning came, I endured, and I died, and when I woke up...
"Up. Up, Elric...." and nothing... shit.
I think the engine of my resurrection was straining. I was scattering myself across two hundred deaths and asking a machine I did not understand to gather an increasingly liquid soul out of an increasingly wide unmaking, and the machine was doing it, but I don’t think it was built for this sort of load, and my greatest fear was that this engine had a limit.
The engine that had given me an impossible number of attempts may not, it turned out, be infinite. Maybe I was wrong, but I could not place my bet on an infinite number of attempts, so it only meant that I had to focus more than I had ever done, as none of my deaths could be cheap... I don’t think I could afford it.
∞
So here is where I ended up, after two hundred deaths and change, lying in the ash with the gold sky disassembling me and my Anima growing from fourteen, then nineteen, then twenty-six percent ocean.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 26% liquid ]
I could not grind forever, and I could not be sure that my attempts were endless, and I could never know how many deaths I had left.
Which meant the grind was not the answer. The grind was just the part where I learned the answer.
I closed my eyes to think about all I had learned after enduring the tribulation lightning, and the answer came to me. It was stupid, crazy, and ambitious, but it was the only answer I got.
I had to catch it. Once. All of it. Take the whole judgement from the heavens into my channels; it would be like I was holding the ocean while the sky poured it in, and let the forging finish in a single life instead of a thousand deaths, survive the tribulation, instead of surviving past it.
It would either make me the vessel or scatter me past the engine’s reach forever... I was not going to allow myself to die.
Next death, I would not endure it... Next life, I would answer it.
I let Mortal Shell go, and the golden lightning took my skull, and the engine reached for me.
Opening my eyes to a recording of Mel that was glitching, I did not reach for my staff or the edge of my cot.
A wave of force erupted from my body that tore open my tent, and I saw the storm building above me. Smiling, I reached for the sky.
"Bring it!"