The Jester of Apocalypse

Marven returned to the sect premises. Harel was watching over Gabrias just as he had told her to.

He decided to leave Neave to his own devices. Neave would be fine. Well, for now, at least.

Marven felt utterly lost. A big part of him felt pride that Neave had become such a realm-shattering prodigy. But the other part of him felt ashamed.

He was ashamed of himself for thinking like that. Ashamed for allowing all of this to happen.

“What do I do with that boy…?”

He sat in the corner of their modest new sect building, rested his head on the wall, and sighed. 

“What would Brivia have done…?” 

***

Once Marven had left, Neave finally allowed himself to properly go monster hunting. The old man was a massive distraction.

Neave was deep within a cave and fighting silver-rank monsters on average. He had encountered something of a problem. While Neave could load his body up with near-unlimited life force, there was a soft cap. It was true that life force seeped out of his body slowly, but this sped up drastically the more he had.

Currently, he had even more life force within his body than when the gold path cultivators were chasing him.

He had a lot more life force than he had back then.

Neave pulled out of the cave and decided it was time to experiment. He found a secluded part of the forest and felt no monsters nearby. Neave focused on his nervous system and probed around a bit.

That proved to be an unwise idea. Severe hallucinations, intense headaches, and extreme fear were among the lesser side effects. Among the bigger ones, he lost eyesight within the left side of his vision and couldn’t quite remember who he was.

Resting a bit, he regained himself, and his brain recovered.

Rather than do the wise thing and stop, Neave continued probing around. Eventually, everything went black, and he lost consciousness.

ÞÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave found himself within the mysterious realm again. Not even a second later, he was forced to dodge as a horde of the altered demons rushed at him.

“What the fuck is this shit!”

Are these things multiplying!?

Neave sped up his perception and flushed his entire body with life force. True strike after true strike proved ineffective, as he didn’t have the time to execute a slow strike. Neave fueled his strikes with excessive life force and barely delivered a few decent blows before getting overwhelmed and eaten alive.

ReÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave was back to reality again. It had maybe been a few minutes at most. His experiment was partially successful but incomplete.

So he made himself pass out again.

ÞÞÞÞÞ

Neave appeared within the realm again; this time, surrounded. Countless demons were around him, throwing themselves over one another as they rushed to devour him. Neave used a movement technique and ran past the mass of bodies.

“Are these fucking things multiplying every time I die!?”

He was in for a lot of trouble if that was the case. Neave had no idea what the consequences of dying too often within this realm could be, and he didn’t want to find out.

He flooded his body with life force again, accelerating far above his usual, already monstrous speed.

Even this didn’t seem to be enough. These creatures were fast beyond belief. Neave was rapidly running out of qi, and he didn’t want to find himself in a situation where he had to run from these things without any qi.

Neave used a movement technique and changed directions. He flew right into one of the abysses scattering the realm. As he fell deeper and deeper, he dodged the endless metallic spikes. Soon enough, the demons were falling right after him. Some of them suffered a bit of damage from the sharp protrusions, but not nearly enough to slow them down.

Neave flew through the air, and he focused. Suddenly, he blinked and slammed hard into the side of the abyss.

No luck there.

Then he did it again. Several times Neave smacked right into the wall of the pit. He was losing both precious time and wasting qi. But he didn’t stop. Eventually, Neave spun in the air and landed on one of the spikes, phasing through the wall and appearing within a cave.

“Hehehe, eat my shit, losers!”

Neave didn’t want to tempt fate by waiting for them to find a way inside the cave. He ran as deep as he possibly could into the cave. Eventually, he reached a dead end. Neave took a deep breath, ran at the wall, and appeared on the other side.

“Yes!”

He was inside another cave. After exploring around for a bit, he found no entrance.

Neave cackled to himself. He noticed something strange the first time he ended up inside this realm. When he woke up, the time that had passed outside wasn’t the same as on the inside. This could mean a few things. Either the flow of time was skewed somehow or…

This place worked the same way the loop did. Which meant that no matter how much time he spent here, it wouldn’t reflect on the outside world.

He didn’t know what this realm was, but his scholarly mind had connected a few dots. This was probably related to those statues he found within the loop. But Neave had no interest in that whatsoever.

There were more important things to be done. First, this realm effectively meant Neave had another place where he could experiment without consequences!

The hordes of mighty demons were slightly inconvenient, but that could be dealt with once he gained more power.

Now that he was in a place like this, Neave was overwhelmed with choice paralysis. There were simply so many things that he wanted to experiment with.

True strikes, life force, weaponsmithing, spirit powers, qi techniques!

And so, so much more.

Neave didn’t hesitate to experiment on one thing at a time when he was in the loop since he had as much time as he wanted. This place wasn’t quite the same. There was a limit here. He only slept so often, even if he could turn an instant into weeks. Yes, he could just knock himself out, but what about the creatures?

Perhaps if he died a few more times, he would be so utterly surrounded by those horrors that he couldn’t move an inch from the moment he entered. Sure, perhaps all that meant was that he would lose the precious opportunity to experiment.

But what if there was more to it?

He couldn’t shake off this nasty feeling that something was wrong. What was this place anyway?

Neave remembered that dream he had once, back in the mansion.

Was that just a dream?

It felt like a dream. The realm he found himself within that dream was identical to this one. And this place most certainly didn’t feel like a dream.

Perhaps he should visit the underground structure first?

His heart sped up at that thought. He didn’t know why, but a deep fear overwhelmed him at the thought of doing that.

What would he find if he went there?

He put that off for now.

When he finally decided to do that, he would come prepared.

It was time for him to choose what he wanted to experiment with. One of the things he wanted to do the most was to figure out how to progress in his cultivation. Qi techniques were limited to him due to his painfully low qi reserves and weak cultivation. He could recover qi by eating living or just-dead monsters, but that was only a viable option when he was fighting to kill.

In situations like a duel, the qi he had in his reserves was all he had. Once that ran out, that was it. He could technically just repeatedly use qi restoration treasures, but that was intense for his spirit. Restoring his qi once, twice, or even thrice was fine, but further than that, the damage to his spirit grew exponentially.

There were many ways to circumvent this problem. Qi restoration treasures and spirit healing medicine would be expensive, but it wasn’t out of the question. Perhaps he could use a spirit power to achieve a similar effect to one of his movement techniques. He could also just get more powerful so that he didn’t need to rely on movement techniques so much in the first place.

But the qi techniques…

Neave craved the wayfarer’s authority. He wanted to make qi techniques and wow the world with his impossible talent. Neave immensely enjoyed his father’s reaction when he used that technique. People reacting with pure shock when he pulled off something mind-bendingly impressive was addicting.

For the time being, he decided to step back and determine what he wanted to do, at least somewhat objectively. He had a few criteria that his next experiment needed to fulfill.

Criteria one!

Whatever he experimented with needed to be something he couldn’t do outside.

Criteria two!

It had to be something that would allow him to gain a significant boost to power before he returned here next time.

And finally, criteria three!

It had to be something that could provide satisfactory results immediately.

After combing through his ideas, one stood out as a clear winner—evolving his spirit powers.

The process was wild and unpredictable, so he hesitated to evolve them haphazardly. It wasn’t a matter of danger per se, but undoing an evolution was impossible.

Neave could technically remove spirit powers, but with his current method, it was an all-or-nothing approach. He had to remove all of them to eliminate one. Judging by what happened to Gabrias, removing spirit powers wasn’t particularly safe either.

This place was handy for the opportunity to try out different spirit power evolutions and make the best choice he could once he was out.

Neave wanted to pick a power randomly and evolve them one by one, but it was implausible that he would survive through the evolutions at some point, so he had to prioritize those he felt had the most potential.

Neave started with the most logical choice—troll muscle. Once he initiated the spirit trial, he was second-guessing his choice. The troll had evolved into a, well, he didn’t have a name for this creature. It was the same as the troll, but much less fat and more muscular.

After fighting through the spirit trial, Neave came the closest he had ever come to losing a trial. This evolved troll was a menace. Its strength was insane, and its regeneration was in an entirely different realm of holy crapness. Neave managed to fight through the spirit trial, but he paused just as he was about to finish off the final creature, the immobilized toxic abominid. He remembered the experiment he wanted to conduct.

Neave stepped back. He summoned life force into his hand. Or at least he tried, but nothing happened. He also tried manifesting qi, but it felt locked to the inside of his body.

He sighed. Did that mean that generating spirit within the spirit realm was a no-go? Neave didn’t give up. Combining the forces inside the spirit realm wasn't necessary to get them there.

Neave could fix the manifestation of his spirit by loading his spirit up with life force. Inside this realm, what he had probably wasn’t ‘real’ qi and life force, but rather some spiritual construct equivalent to these energies. Using qi inside this realm wasn't draining his actual qi reserves outside.

This meant that he had to somehow inject his real life force and qi into his spirit.

Neave just tried the first thing that came to his mind, he did the same thing as when he pushed life force into his spirit, but he joined that together with qi in the ratio needed to make crystallized spirit.

Immediately, the entire realm around him began cracking, and he screamed.

“Aaah, what the fuck is that!”

He immediately fixed the damage to his spirit and stopped doing that. That was a fucking terrible idea. What about ethereal spirit? He tried that next, and it just didn’t work. Luckily, there was no pain this time, but the spirit seemed to have just evaporated.

Next up, he used liquid spirit. Immediately, all around him, morphing masses of unusual shapes appeared. This wasn’t the same situation as with crystallized spirit. There was no pain or damage this time. Neave reached out to one of the floating pieces of indistinct, morphing matter.

It was hard keeping a hold of it. It was constantly shifting from one random object to another, but Neave could tell that as time went on, the objects that the shape was morphing into were getting more and more restricted. They went from entirely random stuff like chairs, paintings, stands, bricks, rocks, piles of dirt, plants, and broken bottles to less random things like blood, black ooze, obsidian, the sword he held in his hands, rocks that looked a whole load like the random rocks lying around his spirit realm.

Eventually, the morphing entirely slowed down, and the object that appeared was another obsidian plant.

Neave repeated the same thing. This time he grabbed the morphing shape with all his strength and focused his life force on it. Then he focused more liquid spirit directly into the shape.

The feeling was highly uncomfortable, but he pushed through it and forced his will into the object. Eventually, the object that popped out wasn’t just a random object already found within his realm.

Neave created another sword identical to the one he appeared with.

Oh, this is about to become very fun.