Forever

There was no falling this time. Salim simply closed his eyes and let the pain fade into dull aches around him as he drifted closer and closer to the light. No thoughts flowed through his head as existence faded, a void in his mind opening up the passage to a comforting abyss.

Salim woke to the white void and complete silence, like he had awoken from a deep sleep and not death from painful infection. His body jerked awkwardly as he tried to move, limbs feeling weighted and painfully slow. Finally figuring out how to move his body, he pushed up off the ground and shakily stumbled over to the floating box.

You have died.

Cause of death: “Infection”

Total Score

Level = 13 Points

Class = 10 Points

Stats = 20 Points

Titles = 15 Points

Total is 58 Points.

Spend Points in Shop before Respawn.

Emotionally feeling like a brick wall, Salim looked at his options, eyes half glazed over as he perused. His fifty points let him go through a few of the items, except that all the options were organized with no rhyme or reason, thousand point items above several cheaper options. He ordered all the items from least to greatest in expense and considered his options, perusing everything he could feasibly buy.

↑

Points: 58

Point Store

Confirm

⏺

Increased Stats

5P Per Stat

-/+

|

Basic Class Weight

50P

-/+

|

Basic Skill

50P

-/+

↓

Increased Level

50P Per Level

-/+

Clicking on [Basic Class Weight] he was slightly disappointed to see that it didn’t offer any explanation, but he could infer what it might do. Still, he decided that he wasn't going to purchase anything he didn’t fully understand, so he decided to invest into stats, seeing as they gave him the most effect early on. Shoving all his points into [Increased Stats] he came up with the equivalent of two full levels, plus a little extra.

Slowly coming to his senses as he stared blankly at the screen in front of him, the past week of pain and suffering slowly caught up to him. Like he was coming out of a dream, his legs started to flag as the weight of his previous life pressed down on him like a vise.

It hurts so much, he thought as he slid down to his knees, laying down on the ground. The ground was made up of a completely solid material that didn’t seem to have any other definable quality than smooth. Still, slamming his hand into the ground elicited pain and reminded Salim that he was still alive.

“Why was I chosen? Who brought me here? Do I have a purpose, or am I just an experiment?” Salim yelled out into the void, the sound simply disappearing as no echo returned his question.

This is just my own perpetual hell, I want to go home, Salim bemoaned in his head.

Laying on the ground, unmoving, Salim screwed his eyes shut but was unable to sleep. There was something about the void that bore into his eyelids, and no matter how he twisted or turned, he couldn’t escape its invisible pressure. He finally gave up and stared blankly at the floating screens for a while, purple feeling like a good alternative to the bright white that encompassed the rest of his vision.

Words swam through his head as he tried to remember their voices, Nadalie’s the loudest of them all. Loneliness curled viciously in his stomach, hollowing him out, slowly at first but with endless stamina. On an intellectual level, he knew that stewing in homesickness and despair wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t not do it, he felt like he needed to do it, if just for a little longer.

So he lay and stewed, the white void waiting, an endless expanse and tiny prison at the same time. It felt like he was suffocating, panic sitting on his chest like an anvil, his stomach close to giving in. Heart accelerating as he tried to stop himself from thinking about death, his family, Nadalie…

No.

Cutting through the static of his brain, Salim pushed to regain control of his own body, breathing in and out, in and out. Taking control back from his lungs, Salim was able to start thinking a little logically, I am here and now, what happened can’t be changed, but I am stronger than that. It felt like he was trying to pull himself together with words, but his mantra made the load feel a little lighter.

Wiping tears and snot from his face that had appeared on his face, Salim flicked them out into the void as he slowly stood up. His legs were shaking, but he was able to mostly ignore it as he applied his stats to try and distract his mind.

Lvl. 0

Stats

Confirm

Might: 8 (10)

-/+

Finesse: 9 (10)

-/+

Resilience: 7 (10)

-/+

Acuity: 12

-/+

Resolve: 14

-/+

Depth: 0 (5)

-/+

The burn was uncomfortable, especially shoving five points into [Depth] right away, but it helped keep his mind distracted, focused on the very real pain that was coursing through his body. Now that he knew what [Depth] did (to a degree), he could barely feel a core forming, etched by an invisible hand that pushed channels through his body that simply hadn’t been there before.

Once the itching had faded, Salim looked to see if there was anything new about the core that was different from when he discovered it initially. He pulled himself deep into a meditative stupor and looked around at his core, not seeing anything overtly different, just an empty core that was useless without energy. Deciding that nothing must be different, Salim decided to direct his thoughts towards the application of the energy.

Maybe my ability to cast spells is linked to a skill? Or could it be more based on my actual capabilities or stats…

It was entertaining to muse over magic, especially when he had no clue how it worked, he would have to do a lot more tests, but it was a good time waster and distraction. He knew that he was delaying hitting the respawn button, only to finding himself somewhere completely different once again. But he knew that it wasn’t something he could put off forever, the void being one of the reasons, with its piercing bright light that made him feel like he was slowly going insane.

He knew he couldn’t stay.

But on the other hand, he would rest in assured safety for now, despite the void assaulting him with violent color theory. Trying to find something to keep him entertained, Salim went back to looking inward, staring at his empty core and trying to peer slightly outside of it into the rest of his body. He wasn’t making any progress, but it was something he could occupy his time, as it let him ignore most of the light that was searing into his retinas.

After a while of sitting and failing to discover the secrets of his body he folded, he was just getting too bored, and the void was starting to become an unavoidable distraction. His eyes felt like they were getting washed out, with a perpetual buzzing filling his ears. Feeling like he was going insane, Salim took a deep breath, before pressing the button on the screen in front of him.

Respawn

Closing his eyes preemptively, Salim saw darkness rapidly consume his vision through his eyelids like someone flipped a light switch. With one simple press, he was out of the void and placed somewhere in the world. He felt a light breeze brush against his skin as he opened his eyes and adjusted to the brightness.

It was dark, probably night, and while it was still hard to see, the moonlight lit up the ankle tall grass that stretched into small patches of trees. Waving in the breeze, the grass looked hypnotic with pale light illuminating their stems. It was peaceful and empty, Salim could see for what looked like miles as the land stayed flat, only interspersed with tiny hills that could be only a few feet tall.

Wait, Moonlight?

Peering up at the sky, Salim looked at the moon… or what he could only assume was a moon. Staring back at him was a pale silver orb, brightly shining and illuminating the grassland. However, right along the middle was what looked to be the outline of an eye, outlined with what looked like shadow. He felt confused, because he was sure that for the entire time he had been stumbling around, there was no moon.

Do moons just appear, or am I on a completely different planet? Salim quickly pulled up his system to confirm it was still there, but otherwise had no way to know if he was on a different planet. The air still felt the same, the grass and trees looked similar, nothing seemed out of place except for the moon.

The eye shadow thing was weird, maybe that's just how the craters happened to form? But he had never been into astrophysics in school, so his knowledge was rather limited. Strangeness aside, it was a boon for him, making it easier to see at night, instead of the pitch black that made it impossible to see. The light coming from the moon was strange now that he thought about it, the best descriptor was that everything covered in moonlight seemed to almost shine, although it could have just been from how bright the moon was.

Standing in the grass while taking in the breathtaking scenery, he felt a tingling sensation wriggled its way down his spine, causing him to shiver. The feeling didn’t stop as it moved and twisted into his skin, feeling like a bad sunburn as it burrowed deeper into his skin. It pushed, feeling raw and acidic as it pushed through his veins, he doubled over in pain as it burned his face, only to fall over as it burned his neck.

Slowly the burning stopped, Salim felt like his soul was filled to the brim and so bloated that a needle could pop it. It was a new kind of pain that he had never felt before, so he quickly looked inward at the core in question to figure out what was going on.

Looking at the core that [Depth] had created, Salim watched as a quicksilver liquid slowly undulated inside, stretching the bounds of the sphere as it tried to escape. It felt different from the green sap of the trees, the burning sensation especially, and the sap had never tried to force its way into his core like the silvery fluid. The burning he felt worried him especially, as he wasn’t entirely sure if death via weird magic orb would result in permanent damage even after his death. The best description he could come up with for the substance was liquid moonlight, as the energy was clearly related somehow.

It had completely filled him, and he could feel the pressure of more moonlight trying to force its way in from his neck and back, squeezing him like a can. Picking himself off the ground, he stumbled towards a clump of trees, trying to get under some cover out of the now hostile gaze of the moon. Reaching the tree's shade, Salim ducked underneath a branch and took a deep breath, calming his uneven panting; he needed to get used to being shoved back into his office worker physique.

Mentally fiddling with his core, Salim looked with his mind's eye; he didn’t know whether this was his head's representation of what the core looked like or if he actually had a sphere filled with liquid inside of him that he could actually see. All he knew, is that he wanted the painful moonlight out of his body. But without a skill, it was a little difficult to extricate the liquid, as it seemed to refuse any prodding to leave his body.

Not ready to give up, Salim kept messing with his bloated core for what felt like the next couple of hours. The burning on his back had stopped since he had gotten under the small tree, so the pressure wasn’t terrible, yet he had to experiment on ways to remove it. Focusing as much as possible, Salim tried to push the liquid moonlight out in the same way his energy sap skills worked, to little effect.

The moonlight would slip from his grasp and pull back, either because he wasn’t doing something right or just lacked the skill to keep hold. It was all assumptions and guesses along with stumbling around in the dark hoping to get something right, but even with the stress and pain of the new situation, Salim felt a small amount of enjoyment. Puzzles had always been a fun time sink and, to his perspective, experimenting with the moonlight felt like a mystery he was slowly uncovering.

The mental prods and pokes made him realize that the liquid was strangely semi-solid, if it was compressed too hard then it wouldn’t budge, but gently coaxing it would make it flow like a liquid. It was hard to wrap his mind around, since a lot of the process was mentally picturing his actions towards a substance that he couldn’t truly see and receiving feedback in the form of stinging pain.

After a long while of messing with the substance, Salim had to move around the base of the tree as the moon began to set, shining light where he had previously been sitting. The burning sensation of the moonlight had been a good reminder to hide away on the other side of the tree. As the moon began setting, the pressure on the liquid waned, more relaxed than it had during the majority of the night, finally allowing him enough control to attempt removal of the liquid.

By the time the sun began rising in the morning, Salim felt like he was on the cusp of an epiphany. He had figured out a way to push the liquid into the rest of his body, similar to what his [Reinforced Stamina] had done, the issue was that it was very picky with the way he moved the moonlight. Seeing the light of dawn shining directly into his eyes, Salim prepared himself to channel a skill he didn’t have. Pulling deep, Salim warped the liquid into tentacle-like shapes before siphoning it into where he felt his arm should be.

So close… Almost got it… There! He pulled with a slight grunt as pain flared in his right arm. The acidic liquid flowed up, funneled through and out of his arm, causing it to glow a dull silver as the raw light flowed out of it.

While he was recovering from turning his arm into the world's most painful glow stick, two boxes sprang to life in front of him.

You channeled foreign energy through your body for the first time.

Event has been Logged.

You have gained a Level!

You have gained your first Level.

Select Class in Menu.

That was interesting.