The Jester of Apocalypse

Just once.

Just fucking once.

Neave wanted to, if only a single time, experience what it was like to get an idea, try the idea, and have it work without any complications.

Yet another plan had come and gone, and that experience slipped through his fingers once more.

Neave had read a bit about giving plants spirit powers. It wasn’t entirely accurate to say that plants could be ‘granted spirit powers,’ but rather, plants could be granted a quasi-spirit.

Plants possessed a quasi-soul, which was to say, a meek soul that had no spirit. Granting them a spirit power gave them a quasi-spirit, which lacked a soul. So plants couldn’t technically be granted a spirit power but a completion of their spirit.

An extensive, highly complex branch of herbology was dedicated to raising plants like this. It was so difficult and dangerous that one needed special permission from the emperor to be allowed to do it.

Some plants had a lot of liquid, or sap, or whatever, that allowed herbologists to grant them a power, similarly to how humans acquired it.

These plants tended to become rather… Violent.

Neave wanted to use this method to grant a spirit power to this plant, allowing it to reproduce faster.

Naturally, the process wasn’t so straightforward. Neave could technically just pick any random slime or abominid, grow their core and use it to grant the plant an outer spirit, but the results of such experiments were bound to be chaotic at best.

The worst thing that could happen was that the plant could mutate in a way that defeated the purpose of what Neave was trying to do.

So he hesitated. He picked through many of the different cores but found none that satisfied the requirement. He tried growing new, unique slimes, feeding them obsidian shards, and successfully creating obsidian golems.

Killing a few of them resulted in, sadly, nothing of value. Although the powers were interesting, Neave didn’t see how they could help him with the plant.

First of all, what would a plant even need to grow faster? Neave only had one of these plants for now, and well, if reproducing it was simple, he wouldn’t struggle like this in the first place.

A power akin to his integrate sounded nice, but it would likely kill the plant. The problem was that while giving a plant a quasi-spirit was straightforward, adding extra powers on top was nearly impossible.

Once the plant had an outer spirit, any new spirit powers introduced would start a spirit trial. Plants weren’t the best fighters, to say the least.

Not to mention that any form of power that altered or added physical characteristics was out of the question. While abominids and other monsters shared enough similarities with humans to allow for compatible abilities, plants lacked the same physical features.

Perhaps if he had a few monster plants in here? Neave didn’t want to bring monster plants here for a while. Or at all, really. They didn’t serve the same purpose that typical plants did. Plants were meant to introduce energy to the realm, while monster plants would just consume it.

So Neave was lost. What to do?

Should he give up on this line of reasoning and try something else instead?

That may have been a good idea.

Then suddenly, it struck him. Plants had no spirit at all… When creatures with a spirit went through a spirit trial, they eliminated any excess, empty spirit. This was why there was no point in growing massive cores for spirit powers.

What about the plant? It wouldn’t go through a spirit trial if it had no spirit. If it didn’t go through a spirit trial, it wouldn’t eliminate any excess spirit…

Neave grinned ear to ear.

Who needed a monster core anyway?

Neave returned to the plant.

He fused qi and life force to produce crystallized spirit. The ball of spirit grew larger than Neave himself. He ignited his lungs with qi and kept going.

Once he created a ball of spirit large enough to fill the cavern, he chewed off the walls to make space for creating an even bigger one.

Neave stood next to the plant and observed his creation. A perfectly round, gigantic ball of crystallized spirit. It was an awe-inspiring sight.

Now then… Neave looked at the plant next to him.

…

How do I melt this thing into the plant?

…

Uh oh.

This may be a failure in the end. Neave didn’t know whether the plant had enough material to fully envelop this massive ball.

He wouldn’t give up now. Neave was no quitter. This experiment ignited something deep within him, something insane, something apocalyptic, something that wanted to witness the product of this absurd test.

His perseverance prevented him from dropping this experiment because it was simply too much fun. And utterly mad.

Neave started his work. He broke off a few pieces of the plant, carefully chipping off a few smaller branches. He carefully injected it with his liquid spirit and manipulated qi to warm it. After heating it so much that it glowed, it still didn’t melt.

Neave frowned. This plant was much more challenging to manipulate than he expected. He recollected several qi techniques alchemists used to deal with such materials. His weak qi couldn’t fully replicate the desired effect.

Still, after stacking a few different techniques on top of one another, he managed to loosen up the structure of the branches enough for them to begin melting and turning into a liquid. Neave felt as if he were attempting to move mountains as he struggled to shape the robust material. Even liquified, it resisted his attempts at altering its shape.

Neave persevered. Slowly, gradually, over days, he lined the surface of the gigantic ball with a thin, almost invisible layer of glass. Although he pushed the thickness of the material to its absolute limits, he still ran out of material frequently and had to break off more branches.

Even though the experiment itself went slowly, it progressed smoothly. The more significant issue was that Neave took too much material off the plant. He could feel it was still alive and not in immediate danger of dying, but it shrunk, day after day until all that was left was a thin, long branch.

Neave still needed a bit more material.

He even prayed to damn Astrador that the plant lived as he chipped off one final piece.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” The plant began leaking too much life force and spirit to maintain itself, “Shit! That’s what I get for praying to that asshole!”

Neave panicked and rapidly went to complete the experiment. Once he fully enveloped the massive spirit ball, he forged a tiny, minuscule glass tendril connecting the plant to the ball.

…

Now he just had to… Melt all of the glass to submerge the entire ball.

“Ffffffffuuuuck!”

How the hell would he do that? Neave went into a frenzy as he ran through all his ideas. Finally, he settled for blowing as much fire at the ball as possible to make the process easier and then manually using the life force tendril to maintain the structure of the thin layer of glass as it melted.

It was a desperate, awful idea that was extremely unlikely to work.

It needed to work. Neave focused with all his might. He felt his spirit tearing at the edges as he pushed the life force tendril through the entire layer of glass. He breathed heavily, disrupting his delicate balance, so he stopped breathing. His shaking made his movements unstable, so he paralyzed his body. His heartbeat distracted him, so he stopped his heart from beating.

Seconds turned into minutes, and Neave felt his body screaming at him, but even that was nothing compared to the stress his spirit was undergoing.

Just as he felt he was about to collapse…

The ball began shrinking. Neave released his hold on the tendril and passed out.

He woke outside, taking less than a second to knock himself back out again.

When he reentered, he found Astrador staring at him, wild-eyed and fuming.

“Kid… What the fuck have you done?”