"Bring it!"
The words tore out of me, and the sky heard, and as if I angered the world itself, the storm compressed even more than it had already done, as the black clouds that had been spreading from horizon to horizon compressed into a single point directly above the camp.
Now, I saw that I was not wrong, above me was a gigantic black cloud in the shape of a lidless eye, and I gaped in astonishment because I recognized this eye; in fact, it was in the back of every Acolyte robe I had ever worn.
The sigil of the Aldenmere Academy was a lidless eye, and at the Adept level, that Sigil would be changed to a lidless eye with a cross at its center, which signified that a mage had mastered a single element, and with more crosses in the center of the eye denoting all the elements mastered by the mage.
I had always believed that these sigils were just that, sigils, and were only a means of identification, but this tribulation cloud above me was saying something else.
A weird sound came from the eye like the sound of lightning being stretched beyond my auditory range, and a golden cross appeared in its center; from the cross, lightning... poured.
It resembled a column of liquid gold, thick as a carriage, and it fell directly on me, obliterating everything around me.
I could briefly sense that the ground beneath my feet had cratered and turned to molten magma, but my body was held in the air, suspended by the lightning.
The lightning that held me in place was a river of judgement, from a world’s desperate refusal to let me be what I was becoming. It flooded my channels, the ones Cor Telluris had built, the ones the tribulation had hammered, the ones that were still raw and new. It filled them to bursting, and then it kept filling.
[Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 26% → 31% → 37%]
My body lit up from the inside, and I felt the engine stir, far below, reaching early, certain, that I was about to die, because it had gathered me out of this exact unmaking hundreds of times, and it was already extending itself to do it again.
"No," I told it. Not this time. "Stay where you are."
Unexpectedly, the Hollow Avatar chose this time to speak, "You are dying, it said in its annoyingly calm voice, but there was something underneath it now that I could not picture- was it curiosity? "The loop may no longer be stable if this continues, and if you die now, there may be no return."
"Then I won’t die."
"You are already..."
"I said I won’t die."
I reached into the gold river, and I grabbed the world’s refusal to let me be. By all the lights in heaven, it fought me, and I felt my flesh turning to ash under the lightning, but I borrowed the Hollow Avatar’s ability to erase pain, and I pulled the lightning into me.
∞
Here is the secret the grind had been teaching me, and why I had known that I would not die to the tribulation:
My channels were built to carry Creation-Anima. And the tribulation was Creation’s own correction, the heavens’ lightning was the purest expression of the law I was breaking, and for now I was not acknowledging the fact that this tribulation carried the sigil of our Academy... those answers would come after I survive this.
Beneath the golden lightning and the weight and the judgment, it was the same substance as the thing it had come to punish. The world was trying to delete an ocean of Creation by striking it with a bolt of Creation, and that is a thing you can do to a man who fights the bolt, but it is not a thing you can do to a man who drinks it.
Covered by lightning that was not just destroying the world around me but my body and soul as well, I laughed.
Our Academy Sigil that I dismissed turned out to be the final piece of the puzzle, and I understood the shape of the truth.
The tribulation was not just a test, which was looking at it from one perspective only; I should have seen it as a conversation. The world was not rejecting me. It was asking me if I was sure of what I was becoming, and willing to pay the price.
There was never a chance that I would reject this offer, because there would be nothing left to go back to if I stepped back.
’Yes,’ I thought. ’Yes, I am sure, I understand, and I will pay.’
There was a slight pause, and the golden lightning changed, and it was no longer the judgement that was scouring me clean, but also acceptance as well.
The river of lightning flowed into me, and instead of tearing me apart, it began to build my bones, my channels, my heart, my soul. The golden lightning wove through them, strengthening, reinforcing, completing the work that the Third Earth Gate had begun.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 37% liquid ]
[ — 40% ]
[ — 58% ]
This was not all; even Cor Telluris was being fed by this lightning, and a new type of channel exploded across my entire body.
[Cor Telluris - Channels: 531 → 654 → 738]
Vast golden lightning, poured through channels built for it and ridden by a boy who had learned its grammar one death at a time, stopped being the thing that emptied the ocean and became the thing that filled it.
Every bolt of lightning condensed a little more of my Anima toward liquid by compression. The sky was pouring the last of the sea into me, and I was wide enough to hold it.
[ — 77% ]
[ — 91% ]
[Cor Telluris - Channels: 738 → 895 → 1,005 → 1187]
I was screaming, and there may be a version of this where I tell you I was serene, but I was not. You needed to be in my shoes to understand what I was going through.
Every part of my body was being asked to become more than it was ever built to be, all at once, in a single life, by your own stupid, crazy, ambitious choice. I screamed as I held the current, and I rode it, and I did not let go, and I did not, thankfully, die.
[ — 99% ]
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusion complete — 100% ]
[ Anima State: Liquid (Creation-Anima, Tier Three) ] - Lightning Adept
[Cor Telluris - Channels: 1450]