Aspects

He looked at Kri’s sleeping form, his eyes seeing more than anyone else in the room. The soul healing totem was placed in one corner of the room. What happened to Kri had damaged everything, even her soul. After the healing potions rebuilt her body, he had been forced to feed her the only soul regeneration potion that Zenker had. Ryun assumed that with the totem he didn’t need many of them.

Anrosh sat next to her, softly brushing Kri’s hair. Her green body was pale, but Ryun was sure that she would recover. Her hand had been regrown by the potions, as had her eyes. He had gouged them out again, though, and used a lower grade potion to heal over the wounds. That part of her training wasn’t done yet.

They all had questions, but, right now they were just waiting for her to wake up. Ryun already had… ideas, what he had sensed and saw with his eyes, it revealed something that he hadn’t thought about before. He saw Kri stir, and then slowly over the next few minutes, she woke up.

He detected the moment she went from sleeping to wakefulness, and was about to speak when Anrosh beat him to it, realizing it too.

“Kri, it’s okay,” she patted her hand. “You’re okay.”

Kri sat up suddenly, then her body tensed. A moment after she screamed, her hands moving over her ears, her body thrashing. Anrosh moved for her, but Ryun used [Inevitable Step] and grabbed her arm before she could touch her.

“It’s her sense,” Ryun told Anrosh when she whirled on him. “She isn’t used to it. In battle she was… sharpened, in the moment. It’s overwhelming her now.”

“What do we do?” Anrosh asked as Kri twisted and turned on the bed.

“Wait, she’ll remember,” Ryun said.

Over the next few minutes, Kri’s twitches and screaming lessened then stopped. Her breathing was still quick, and she would wince from time to time. They had brought her into the city, and depending on her range she would be feeling quite a lot of things. Not that it would’ve mattered even if they had stayed out of the city, everything in the world constantly created resonance, constantly created a noise that she would feel.

Finally, Kri stilled, remained unmoving for a minute, then she moved her head as if she was trying to see. A moment later she raised a hand to her face and found the blindfold. Her fingers slipped beneath it and touched the scar tissue. He sensed her body tense as things came back to her, as she realized that she was blind. Her head turned toward them, even though she couldn’t see. The habit of having her head pointed in the direction of the person she was focusing on. He would need to get her to break that. Her head paused in his direction, and then she spoke. “I’m… alive?”

“You are,” Ryun responded.

“Everything is so… loud,” Kri whispered. “There is so much noise.”

“You evolved your skill,” Ryun added. “You’ll get used to it.”

“Is this how it is for you all the time?” Kri asked. “I can sense… everything.”

“Do you know how far you can sense?” Ryun asked.

Kri shook her head. “I can’t tell.”

Ryun walked over to the window and opened it up. “Tell me when you can no longer sense me.” Then he jumped out and started climbing through the air.

Back in the room he heard Kri ask how she was supposed to do that in confusion, and Tali tell her that she just needed to say it and he could hear. He didn’t get far before she spoke to the room, and Ryun returned back down.

“Around five hundred meters,” he said as he stepped back in. “Not to bad.”

“I… you blinded me,” Kri whispered. “You threw me into a cave with a monster.”

She was starting to breathe quickly again, her heart started to beat faster.

“You made the choice,” Ryun said.

Kri shook her head, then started touching her right arm. “I… lost my arm. I was dead.”

“Nearly,” Ryun added. “But you didn’t die, and you gained what you wanted. Power.”

“I… I… I did survive,” she said slowly. “But, I don’t remember how.”

“Tell us what you do remember,” Anatalien said.

Kri started retelling the events of yesterday starting with Ryun throwing her into the cave. She went through the early moments of the fight with the monster, her focusing and evolving her skill.

“Then…” Kri hesitated. “I lost my arm, the viper ripped it off. I… I remember losing blood, feeling cold. Dying.”

“And then?” Anatalien leaned closer when Kri paused.

“I… I don’t know, I just felt… cold.”

Tali glanced at Ryun, it seemed like she didn’t remember.

“Can you show us your screens Kri?” Ryun asked.

Kri hesitated for just a moment before she made her screens visible to all of them. Ryun immediately found what he was looking for.

Titles

Personal Feat: Glimpse of Aspect

Glimpse of the core concepts of your Aspect and gain a deeper understanding.

+5% to all stats, (Aspect Improvement) 50 Celestial Essence

She Knew The Absolute Cold

Your achievement, drive, or effort is recognized.

+100 to base wisdom, She Knew the Absolute Cold (Grand Perk), 10 Celestial Essence

Absolute Cold (6) (Aspect Perk)

When using infusing techniques your attacks inflict cold damage. Cold Qi courses through your body making you resistant to cold, +90% cold resistance. Gain +25% to endurance and wisdom.

She Knew The Absolute Cold (Grand Perk)

You came face to face with your own death, you saw through what was beyond and you defied it. The closer you are to death the more you connect with the plane of Absolute Cold. The closer you are to death, the greater the cold that seeps from the plane of Absolute Cold into you and then emits from your body. The cold effect culminates with death, and deals ultimate damage at the end.

A powerful perk, a dangerous perk. There was much that he needed to learn it seemed.

“A Personal Feat is not required for a Grand Perk. It just so happened that she gained one because of the other,” Tali explained. The two of them had left Kri to rest, she was still not quite recovered. And they had a lot of things to do, all of which she would need her strength for.

“She reached for her Aspect at the end,” Ryun said slowly. He saw what Tali was trying to say. Kri glimpsing the core of her Aspect was not tied to what her Grand Perk was. It was when she pulled from the plane of Absolute Cold that she gained the Grand Perk.

“I am still not sure how she did that,” Tali added.

“If all of our cores are connected to the planes of our Aspects, then that opens up a lot of interesting questions,” Ryun said. He had never wondered how a core replenished Qi. He chalked it up to the Framework doing its thing, but now… “If our Qi regeneration actually represent the amount and speed of Essence that we can pull from the Aspect planes. Hm… I’ve always thought that there were clear differences between the three focuses, but perhaps I was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“In the end, it is all about Essence,” Ryun answered. “A Classer has perks and abilities that are Essence flavored, everything is Essence so of course it is so. I’ve never given it much thought, but I think that perhaps they simply pull Essence from the planes when they need to do something. The Framework just facilitates that. A Skill user does the same thing, except they spend their willpower to force the world around them to obey to change the rules. And then we have us, we pull in the Essence from the planes and pass it through our core, change it and make it more personal. In the end everything is just about the Essence.”

“I see. It still doesn’t tell us how she somehow opened the floodgates inside her core,” Tali said.

Ryun didn’t know that part. He had felt the change, but he hadn’t seen the start of it with his eyes. The aftermath showed him Absolute Cold seeping through her core, freezing her from the inside out, and freezing everything around her. The effect had even damaged him, it had pulled in tier 9 Absolute Cold, but it was more than that. For a moment there it had felt as if he had been fighting against the ultimate expression of the Absolute Cold Aspect itself.

Kri didn’t remember much of what happened at the end, not even what she had glimpsed. But Ryun believed that it would come to her again with time, with training. One did not just forget insight like that. It would be buried deep, but still there. He did wonder why he hadn’t ever felt anything like that, or even got close to it, though he did have a suspicion. An Aspect was shaped by a person, or rather their understanding of it. It could change from person to person. But now Ryun started to believe that each Aspect had an ultimate expression, a truth to it. What if a person could shape the Aspect with their understanding, but only within the confines of that truth. That would mean that Ryun didn’t understand the truth of the Void, he had his own, which did fit into that larger whole, but he knew only a part of it. He had walked far down on his path, believing that he could bend an Aspect how he wished. Every Cultivator knew it, even Classers, everyone had their own idea about their Aspects. Kri… she was young, inexperienced with her Aspect. She was… a blank book. Perhaps that had allowed her to see through, to glimpse that truth.

“If we can figure out how to pull in pure Essence through our cores then…” Tali paused, frowning, then her eyes widened. “Oh.”

Ryun turned his eyes to look at her. He saw that she had straightened, stiffened, as if something had just occurred to her.

“What is it?” Ryun asked.

“I just figured out how Awirren beat me,” Tali said.

Awirren Goldenfeather, The Golden Phoenix, the Sect Head of the Golden Sky Sect. Ryun remembered seeing her fighting in the Tournament City. She had held off a large part of the Dome monsters all by herself. Had forced nearly all of their air combatants to go after her.

“She always had secrets, we all did,” Tali started speaking. “We all had items or powers that hid our screens from others, it is one of the first things that we learned. Knowledge is power. She… never appeared to have any, but I knew. I was her friend. She didn’t hide everything, only a few important things. A title that I knew she should have. Her second path was always displayed as something else. I guess that there was more that she hid than I knew.”

Tali had told him about how she was defeated, how she was ambushed. Even with that ambush, she nearly won, until Awirren overwhelmed her.

“I always thought that it had to be her ideal, that at the end,” Tali continued. “Her Aspect is insanely difficult to fight against. But now I think that she perhaps just… opened herself up to her Aspect, like Kri did. Though she had control over it, it wasn’t like what Kri did.”

“I would assume that there are many things that can be done with this,” Ryun added.

Tali nodded. “I always underestimated Awirren, everyone always does. Even though she never lost a fight, ran away? Yes. But she never lost. Her power is deceptive you see,” Ryun could tell that she was lost in her memories, reminiscing about the past. “If you could see her screens you would think that she was frail, weak. But her True Body is peculiar. She used to be a priestess on her homeworld. The High Priestess of the Church of the Ever Rising Currents, the Warden of the Sky. They adored her, worshiped her, and she led them to the Infinite Realm. The more of her people that love her, that worship, that think her… beautiful, the stronger she gets.”

“You think that she had more insight into her Aspect, and that she had a Grand Perk?”

“Personal Feat like the one Kri has or a Grand Perk,” Tali said. “It is impossible to know now, we don’t know if Kri could leverage the insight she gained without a perk.”

Ryun nodded. “We’ll figure it out, now we know that it is possible, that there is more to a Cultivator’s core than we previously realized.”

Tali met his eyes, then nodded.

“But before that, I need to consolidate my power, my advancement. I hoped that you would give me some of your time.”

Tali tilted her head, and then nodded. “Of course, as long as you tell me again about the memories of the Eternal Cultivator you saw,” she grinned at him.

Ryun chuckled, he should’ve known that she wasn’t going to be satisfied with just one conversation. And if the last one was anything to go by, he should expect a long session filled with questions designed to drain even the insights that he had missed.

But that was fine, it helped him too.