The Second Culling: The Race
1. Participants: All beings (humans, magic beasts, spirit plants) who survived the first culling process (the mental evolution loop).
2. Objective: A race to qualify for the third and final process (the Tower trial).
3. The Token System:
· Every survivor is given a token. The token evolves when the participant breakthroughs to the next realm.
· To enter the third process, one must collect a specific number of tokens to access a specific portal.
. The greater the tier of portal entered,the greater the dangers and the greater the rewards of completion of trial.
4. Portal Tiers & Requirements:
· 1st Tier Portal (Mortals): Requires collecting ten 1st tier tokens.
· 2nd Tier Portal (Awakened): Requires collecting one hundred 2nd tier tokens.
· 3rd Tier Portal (Awakened Master): Requires collecting one hundred 3rd tier tokens.
5. Note: The destination within the corrupted realms for the third trial depends entirely on which tier of portal the participant enters. When a mortal enters an awakened tier 2 portal,the rewards are calculated according due to difficulty.
***
Williams recalled the trial specifics as he tracked down the source of the spirit spring. Although these specifics were but a drop of the information portrayed by the Tower,they were the most important. Bold letters all over them to display it's importance.
Going deeper into the cave, luminous moss and plants paving the way, Williams finally saw the spring.
It wasn't natural in a sense. The liquid natural spiritual energy did not originate from the earth surface. Instead,drops of liquid natural energy dripped from up above. Hundreds of spikes faced downwards as drops fell into the spring.
Drop! Drop! Drop!
Williams squatted to touch the spring. Instantly his whole body was filled with natural energy,making its way straight towards his divine aperture.
A minute later...
Boom!
His divine aperture imploded softly. Williams staggered backwards,sending his will towards the divine aperture.
"What?"
He stood there dumbfounded. Before,when he just opened his divine aperture,it was just a blank white sheet of space. Approximately 1 metre squared. Now however,everything had changed.
Firstly,there was a paddle of spirit spring in a corner of the divine aperture. The blank white sheet was no more and there was solid ground around the spring.
What did this mean, Williams had no idea.
The second change was the size which was now approximately 5m². This was a multiplayer of 5 and had many complications. Firstly, according to the information given by the Tower,it meant he had just broken to the 2nd level of the awakened realm. How cool was that? Or was his luck just out of this world!!
The last change was what shocked him the most.
Before,when he just opened his divine aperture,it's structure was of a 2d world. A sheet of blank white.
Now, however there was a sky and the earth,the 4 cordonal direction and most importantly,spiritual energy was now taking 3 distinct colors in the air between the heaven and the earth.
Instantly he knew what they represented. One represented the soul,another the body representation of raw energy while the last represented spirituality: Spiritual energy tailored for one's own use. Unlike the natural spiritual energy.
Williams looked around curiously,then he came to his senses,retracting his will out of the divine aperture. He took another glance at the spikes that dripped the spring and gently sat in a meditative posture inside the spring.
He wanted to make the best out off this opportunity.
****
The spikes that fed the spirit spring below stretched upward through the darkness, disappearing into fissures that wound higher and higher, carrying with them the steady drip of concentrated spiritual energy that had pooled in Williams's divine aperture far below.
The path was treacherous, the walls slick with condensation and the air thick with the pressure of accumulated power, but for those who could follow the source, the reward,or the horror per se,awaited them at the summit.
At the peak of the mountain, where the wind howled with the voices of the dying and the sky itself seemed to recoil from the carnage below, the battle raged without pause, without mercy, without end.
And Norlan stood at the center of it all.
His form was a study in violent motion, a living blade carved from raw instinct and savagery.
The long, boxy haori coat, draped across his shoulders billowed with each savage twist of his body, the stark checkerboard of black and white squares creating a hypnotic blur as he moved.
The fabric of his coat, patterned in alternating blocks of pure darkness and blinding light, caught the glow of dying beasts and reflected it in fragments, making him appear to phase in and out of existence with each shifting step.
Beneath the coat, the solid white undershirt remained unblemished, a shocking contrast to the crimson that painted everything else upon that peak.
The loose black trousers, dark as the void between stars, whipped around his legs as he pivoted and struck, while the traditional boots left deep impressions in the blood-soaked earth with every planted foot.
Around him, the mountain roared.
Hundreds of awakened beasts surged forward in a tide of fangs, claws, and desperate instinct. They came from every crevice, every shadow, every crack in the mountain's weathered face—a flood of fur and scale and chitin that should have overwhelmed any single defender.
Massive wolf-like creatures,serpentine horrors, avian predators that dove from the churning sky above, their feathers sharpened into projectiles that rained down like nature's own artillery. Beasts of fur and feather, of scale and carapace, of muscle and magic. They all came, driven by something deeper than thought, something primal that screamed in the oldest parts of their consciousness.
The portal called to them.
It hung in the air behind Norlan, magnificent and terrible in its simplicity. No architecture supported it, no frame contained it, no mortal hand had shaped its form. It was simply there,a tear in the fabric of reality woven from pure spiritual energy, a wound in the world that bled light and possibility.
It pulsed with a rhythm that matched the heartbeat of the mountain itself, a slow, deliberate throb that seemed to say: enter, enter, enter. The beasts heard it. They had always heard it. And they would kill to answer its call.
Norlan would not allow them. The reason? He was training! To him, this tier two portal had no appeal. And as a person with no combat experience, he was training his instincts to react to his raw power as a high human. He wanted to cultivate his fighting spirit,his fighting style and more importantly his killing intent.
Exactly as directed by his steward: Titus Grimblade,who was calmly watching the havic by the side. His legs firmly of the corpse of a huge constricting boa.
He watched Norlan with awe,his fighting style held no refinement, no elegance, no wasted beauty. Norlan moved like the concept of violence given flesh, each action flowing into the next with the terrible logic of a storm that cannot be stopped. Just pure raw strength.
When a massive bear-like creature, its fur matted with the blood of previous failures, charged with enough force to shatter boulders, Norlan did not dodge. He met it head-on, his hands finding purchase in the thick hide, and with a twist of his torso that sent the checkered haori spinning like a disrupted chessboard, he ripped.
The creature's spine separated from its skull with a sound like wet wood splitting, and its corpse crashed to the ground, joining the growing mountain of the fallen.
Three more took its place immediately.
"Fucking hell!" Norlan adjusted his stance.
A pack of lithe, cat-like predators circled him with predatory grace, their movements synchronized by years of hunting together in the deeper wilds. They struck as one—from the left, the right, above, and below—a perfect formation that had brought down prey many times Norlan's size.
Norlan did not think. Thinking was a luxury for those who had time, and time had abandoned this peak long ago. Instead, he felt. His body reacted before his mind could form the thought, his left hand snapping out to catch the first attacker by the throat even as his right foot planted and spun, using the momentum to swing the dying creature like a living flail into the second.
Bang!
Their bodies collided with a wet crunch, bones breaking in places bones should not break. The third attacker found only air where Norlan had been, and the fourth found Norlan's boot descending through its skull and into the rocky ground beneath.
The pile of corpses grew.
It rose around him like a grisly fortification, like the walls of a city built from death. The scent of blood became so thick it was almost visible, a copper haze that hung in the air and coated the lungs with every breath.
The ground lost all pretense of solidity, becoming a slick morass of viscera and torn flesh that squelched with every step. And still they came. The beasts did not learn, did not retreat, did not hesitate. Their eyes, whether simple or compound, whether burning with elemental fire or glowing with innate spiritual power, remained fixed on one thing only: the portal.
It sang to them in a language older than words, older than thought, older than the very concept of self. It promised something: evolution, ascension, an end to the gnawing hunger that had driven them since the first culling began. They could not refuse. They would not refuse.
And so they died.
"You know! You can come help you damn retard!"
Norlan's wavy hair, dark as the void between stars, had long since escaped whatever binding might have held it. It whipped around his face with each savage motion, occasionally plastering itself to his skin by the blood that sprayed in constant arcs. His features, usually composed into something approaching neutrality, had transformed into a mask of pure, focused violence.
"You need some hands on experience my lord. And you're doing perfectly well for a newbie..ha.. ha.. aha just go wild.." Titus replied as he adjusted his leg on the boa's head.
"You better watch out your highness..." He pointed.
A massive creature, easily three times his height, emerged from the far side of the peak. It walked on two legs but was no man;its form was that of a twisted ape, its flesh covered in bony plates that gleamed with the unmistakable sheen of spiritual reinforcement.
In its massive hands, it carried a chunk of the mountain itself, torn free and shaped by raw power into a crude but devastating weapon. The lesser beasts scattered before it, giving their alpha room to strike. It roared, and the sound carried enough force to send loose stones tumbling down the mountainside.
"Hahahahah!! That's a big one my liege!" Titus mocked with respect.
But Norlan did not wait for the attack.
He moved forward, not away, crossing the distance between them in three explosive strides. The great ape swung its stone club in an arc that would have flattened a building.
Norlan ducked under it, feeling the wind of its passage ruffle his checkered haori, and then he was inside the creature's guard, too close for the weapon to be useful. His hands found the bony plates covering the ape's chest, and with a sound that was almost a sigh, he pushed.
"A big one indeed!!"
His palms made contact, and the spiritual energy that had accumulated in his divine aperture, the same energy that now dripped as liquid spring far below, erupted. The ape's chest caved inward as if struck by an invisible meteor, and the creature's roar became a wet gurgle as its heart simply ceased to exist.
"Don't ruin it's core,your Holiness. That one's worth more than my second head"
It fell.
Another corpse for the pile. Another life extinguished in service to a goal it could not comprehend. Another core, nestled somewhere within that massive form, left intact and whole.
This was the detail that might have escaped a casual observer, lost as they would be in the sheer spectacle of the slaughter. But for those with eyes to see, with understanding to perceive, the pattern emerged. With each kill, Norlan's strikes were precise in their destruction of life but careful in their preservation of what mattered.
Blows that shattered skulls and snapped spines left the energy centers untouched.
"Wow! I think you're getting the hang of it."
Titus couldn't help but explain as Norlan moved with savage, unrestrained fury, even as the blood painted him in layers of crimson, even as his breath came in controlled bursts and his muscles screamed for rest—he chose where to strike and where to spare.
The cores fell with the bodies.
And as they fell, their spiritual energy began to leak.
It was subtle at first, almost imperceptible amidst the chaos of battle. But as the pile grew, as the corpses accumulated into the hundreds, the leakage became a flow, and the flow became a flood.
The cores, no longer contained within living flesh and active spiritual circulation, released their accumulated power back into the world. It seeped into the mountain itself, following the path of least resistance, trickling down through cracks and fissures, through ancient channels worn by water and time.
It soaked into the stone, filtered through the bedrock, and began its long descent toward the heart of the mountain.
Toward the spikes.
Toward the spring.
Far below, where Williams sat in meditation within the pool of liquid spiritual energy, the flow intensified.
The drips from the spikes became a steadier stream. The spring, already rich with power, grew deeper, purer, more concentrated. The cores of hundreds of awakened beasts, harvested through violence on the peak above, were feeding the miracle below. And Norlan, standing alone against the endless tide, ensured that the flow would not stop.
The beasts screamed their fury to the uncaring sky.
Hours passed, or perhaps minutes,time had lost all meaning on that peak. The sun crawled across the heavens, indifferent to the carnage below.
The pile of corpses had become a mountain in its own right, a grisly monument rising behind Norlan like the throne of a god of war. And still they came.
Norlan stood. His checkered haori, once pristine in its stark geometry, had become a tapestry of gore. The black squares absorbed the blood until they seemed to gleam wetly, while the white squares fought to maintain their purity, resulting in a chaotic pattern of crimson splatter that overlaid the original design like a second coat of paint.
The white undershirt beneath was no longer white—it clung to his torso in shades of red, darkening to brown at the edges where older blood had begun to dry. His black trousers had acquired a sheen that caught the light, and his boots left prints that were as much red as they were brown.
His wavy hair hung in strings, weighted by the blood that had soaked through to his scalp.
His eyes remained clear.
They tracked the movements of a dozen beasts simultaneously, cataloging threats, prioritizing responses, ensuring that no matter how many came, no matter how fast they moved, no single creature would slip through.
Another wave crashed against the shore of Norlan's violence.
Another wave broke.
The corpses piled higher. The cores fell faster. The spiritual energy, rich and pure and filled with the essence of hundreds of fallen beasts, seeped deeper into the mountain's veins, following the ancient paths toward the spikes, toward the spring, toward the meditating figure who sat unaware of the fortune raining down upon him from above.
And Norlan fought on.
The sun began its slow descent toward the horizon, painting the sky in shades of orange and purple that seemed obscene against the red of the battlefield.
The beasts, if they could feel such things, might have noted the passage of time, might have felt the first stirrings of despair as their numbers thinned and their attacks grew more desperate. But they felt nothing except the call, the pull, the irresistible song of the portal. They would keep coming until the last of them fell.
Norlan would keep killing until the last of them died.
It was a simple equation.
Another beast lunged.
Another beast died.
Another core fell.
And far below, in the darkness of the mountain's heart, the spring grew deeper still.