The Jester of Apocalypse

Neave had done quite a bit of experimenting within his spirit realm. Among the first things he did, he tested his spirit realm to see how powerful the time dilation was.

He used the method of throwing a stone into the air, entering the spirit realm, and leaving after some time to see how much the stone had moved.

Neave was bewildered at how much greater the time dilation was than he expected. He thought it would be ten or twenty times at most, but his tests showed that it was more like tens of thousands of times faster.

This wasn’t right. His current theory was that the time dilation wasn’t the same for entering voluntarily as it was for getting forced into the spirit realm by a trial.

Other than that, he had done an absolute ton of renovation. Neave kept pouring ethereal spirit into his realm to test how massive he could make it.

There seemed to be no limit. But there was an unusual phenomenon happening in the outer reaches. It was getting less substantial. At first, the expanding spirit realm looked like the starting area of the loop realm.

But slowly, as it expanded, it merely resembled the loop realm.

It had the same characteristics, randomly strewn about pools of liquids, chasms, and obsidian growth, but it wasn’t representative of what the realm looked like. Eventually, this became an eerily repetitive pattern of chasm, bush, pool, chasm, bush, pool, chasm, and so on.

Then it turned into a relatively flat surface with the occasional bush and pool here and there.

And finally, it became just a continuous, flat, rust-red surface that stretched indefinitely.

Neave ran out quite far, hoping to find something, but there was little point. It was a freaky phenomenon. Neave ran out to the border area again; this time, he had a theory to test.

Neave focused liquid spirit, and as it morphed, he allowed it to solidify into whatever it wanted. It eventually turned into a stone. Neave took that stone and haphazardly threw it out into the unstable zone. Then he manifested more ethereal spirit.

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.

Occasionally, a replica of the boulder appeared outward from where Neave threw the stone.

Neave had a hunch that the new areas created by expanding his spirit realm were based on the shape and substance of the stable area bordering the zone.

He was right.

The further out this went, the less and less this impacted the newly created areas. Even with this boulder, for example, the replicas appeared less frequently until they ceased appearing altogether.

Neave had spent much time experimenting with everything he could think of within the spirit realm. He had discovered a lot of helpful information.

First, he didn’t have spirit powers inside the realm.

He already knew this, but he discovered something of a catch. He didn’t have things like fire breath, the ability to absorb everything by eating it or rapidly regenerating muscles.

But.

Although his body inside the realm was entirely void of spirit powers, that didn’t mean that those spirit powers did not affect the manifestation of his spirit. For example, although he didn’t have absorb, he still had the physique he had acquired through absorbing a ton of monster meat.

In the same vein, while he didn’t have troll muscle, he did have muscles that had grown and strengthened with the help of troll muscle’s regeneration power.

This meant that if powers could directly alter his true physical form, they could translate into additional strength within the spirit realm. This was critical information.

Another thing he discovered was that there was no such thing as fatigue within the realm. He could perform any physical activity he wanted, and it would never result in a feeling of tiredness.

The qi he possessed within the spirit realm, or as he called it, ‘fake qi,’ was also technically inexhaustible. While he did have a limited capacity, once he expended that, all he had to do was close his eyes, and it would fill right back up to full. This didn’t work within spirit trials.

He was a hundred percent confident of that.

He wasn’t sure whether there was such a thing as ‘fake life force’ within this realm. He sensed nothing within his spirit manifestation body.

Either way, getting real life force and qi into this realm was possible, but it worked entirely differently from how it did in reality.

Pushing life force into his spirit just affected his spirit manifestation, be it by boosting its performance or recovering damage. Pouring qi into his realm wasn’t possible if it was just qi alone, but it was possible if combined with life force in the form of spirit.

He hypothesized that something like his ‘potential of experimentation’ trick was possible, but he couldn’t figure it out.

Next up, he discovered that the things his liquid spirit transformed into were objects he had encountered or interacted with. He could force these objects to take a slightly different form than they appeared in initially, but this was somewhat limited.

He also couldn’t manifest objects like spirit cores, regretfully. Well, he actually could, but they weren’t spirit cores. They were just some form of crystalline imitation. Many things were just imitations that he could manifest. Anything living, like a plant, or food, could also be made, but these weren’t organic matter.

The plants felt fake, even if they looked the same as their real-world equivalent. He even managed to manifest small animals and monsters. But they were just inanimate objects that looked precisely like living things but were anything but.

Their insides were made of vague red material that felt stiff and moist.

Ew.

There was another crucial discovery he had made. He could manifest liquids. And a lot while he was at it. He could make entire lakes of water if he wanted to, and not just that, he could also create acid pools.

Neave could manifest things like ice or lava; surprisingly enough, they behaved exactly as their real-world equivalent, even melting and cooling.

Even hurting the way they would in reality. Now his mind was spinning with ideas. What about covering his entire spirit realm in lava? Would that mean invading spirits would get boiled alive?

Or he could cover every inch of everything in large, sharp spikes.

He began pushing his experimentation further. A lot further. One of the more insane things he had done was create the entire Zearthorn library.

He managed to manifest the entire building with all the books on the first floor.

The second, third, and fourth floors were also filled with books, but these books were empty. At least he had seen the library's second floor before, but the third and fourth floors were entirely made up.

These floors looked precisely as Neave imagined they would, but in the end, this was just his imagination. Imagination was one hell of a thing, given that the second floor smelled like sweat.

Neave spent his qi, so he had to go outside and wait a while to recover it. Once he recovered, he went right back inside. There was so much he wanted to try with this realm, but he focused on things he would put into practice the moment he left.

He planned to transform his spirit realm into a place to give him an absolute advantage over the monsters. He wasn’t confident whether all his crazy ideas would work, but he had some that were so unhinged that they could turn spirit trials into a joke.

These ideas included making himself a nice tower while covering everything in lava, wrapping every inch of every surface with spikes, making himself a massive mountain or incline, and rolling boulders downhill at the approaching monsters.

These were all relatively mild compared to some of the truly crazy ideas.

He wasn’t sure whether they would really work, however. Such a cheap trick could get many smaller monsters, but he would need a gigantic boulder to handle the mega abominid.

Ultimately, he wasn’t sure whether the monsters would somehow even out the odds by manipulating the spirit realm. He was confident that he could at least substantially boost his victory odds. If anything, manifesting some sort of armor and a decent weapon was already an improvement.

And if death traps don’t work, perhaps a maze would. Something to keep the monsters separated so he could handle them one at a time.

Neave had already tried manifesting a better weapon and armor. He was successful with the weapon as he manifested the nice steel sword he took from Kamella, but the armor was a different story.

The best he could do was manifest the armor he had seen others wearing.

He never wore armor himself. Neave didn’t know how it felt or how tough it could be. Also, he couldn’t quite imagine armor that could fit him properly. It was frustrating and something he would have to handle once he was back outside in the real world.

For now, he did everything he could to push this discovery to its limits. He could expand the spirit realm into forests if he planted a fake tree or two and padded the floor with grass. He could also make oceans of water, lava, and valleys of spikes.

His goal was to prepare the spirit realm for a test run. His anxiety exploded as he reached closer and closer to his goal of testing it in action.

Neave had settled for a hybrid of some of the ideas he had. He created a large lake of acid which he preferred to lava. In the middle of this acid lake, he built an exceptionally thick metal fortress lined with so many spikes it looked like an iron hedgehog. He didn’t create this in a single go, but he had to painstakingly construct it bit by bit.

He had never seen a massive fortress of spiky iron, so he couldn’t imagine exactly what it would look like.

The lake of acid also contained countless sharp metallic spikes. These spikes weren’t exactly reaching into the sky but only a bit beneath the surface. The acid wasn’t eating away at them since Neave had just imagined the ones he had seen already at the bottoms of acid lakes within the loop.

Neave had also constructed a massive, thick pole of stone that he placed right on top of his aggressive fortress. He would push it by pulling out its support and hopefully make it fall right on top of the mega-abominid.

No matter how many crazy ideas he had and how many of those ideas he put into reality, he always seemed to have more stuff coming to mind.

What about ballistae? He could create those and line every wall to have them shoot out.

What about traps?

What about some sort of cannon or catapult or trebuchet? What if he loaded those with spiky metal balls that contained shredded glass or something else lethal?

Glass! Why didn’t he just fill the entire realm with broken glass and have it embedded into the bodies of the monsters!? Why didn’t he make all the spikes out of glass so they would break and get stuck in their bodies?

Why didn’t he freeze everything over? Why didn’t he hang a ton of boulders on some structure and then drop them down to the ground like meteorites?

Why didn’t he make holes in the ground that would extend to the border beneath the surface? Would that work? Perhaps it wouldn’t even work if he didn’t defeat the creatures inside the spirit realm.

No matter how many things came to mind, there were new ideas, tactics, strategies, materials, methods, and approaches that he could employ and abuse. But before he put any of that into practice, he decided to just go for it.

He could already defeat the trial even without all of this stuff.

Now all he had to do was a test to see how well it did in practice.