I woke with the spike out of my skull and an undead knight already swinging at my neck. I wanted to respond with my threads, but another more powerful instinct took over, and the world... stopped.
I turned around to see the sword hanging four inches from my neck, held up by nothing at all. My eyes widened a bit as I looked around me and saw a single drop of blue fluid that must have emerged with me from the vat, hanging in the dead air a foot from my face, as if it had been painted.
Drawing in a deep breath, it was then that I felt a pressure, deep in my chest, radiating outward from my Anima Depth. It was not a spell or a skill, but I thought I knew what it was.
This had to be a domain, the power that every Arcanist controlled, and somehow, as I struggled to survive in the loop, I had reached this level.
I turned away from the frozen knight and closed my eyes. The last thing I remembered was standing in the sky and watching the world burn with Sovereigns warring above it.
The world... ah, who am I kidding? The status screen had given me a name, Aelmar; it was my home that was burning.
I had seen it for maybe three seconds before I died, and three seconds was enough to keep forever. A whole continent laid out under the clouds, edge to edge, from one horizon to the other, and every part of it was on fire.
Looking back now, I should have known that this facility was airborne. I remembered in the previous loop when I had taken the strange posture I had learned from the Hollow Avatar.
This posture gave me a profound feeling, and it seemed to be accelerating the growth of my channels, Stone Origin Shell. I had discovered that my channels were connected with the earth, but since they were not fully awakened, I did not know the full reach of this connection.
While I had taken that posture, I could feel my channels reaching for the earth, but I had felt nothing but a void beneath me, and I had no time to understand this feeling before I was attacked.
The truth had been right there in front of me for so long, but I had been distracted, and I missed it.
Even without the notification on the status screen, I would have known it was Aelmar after a moment’s deliberation, because I could recognize part of it. Was it the burning coast that I had traced with a finger on a classroom map at Aldenmere, or the shapes of the cities I half-knew from a boy’s life I could barely remember living, going to embers miles beneath my feet.
My family and everything I knew were somewhere down in that fire, and I don’t know if they were alive or dead, or maybe something much worse had happened to them.
I did not know many things, but the one thing I knew was that my home will not burn, not while I had a single breath of life inside me.
But wanting a thing and being able to do it are different animals. The loop taught me that, patiently, over a great many deaths. So I let the picture of my home on fire be buried under the pile of grief inside my heart... it did not stop hurting, but you do not dwell on grief for long if you have a purpose in front of you... And by all the light in heaven, I had one in front of me.
I lifted my head, and the room was still frozen. I distractedly tapped the blade that was hanging in the air beside me, and suddenly a thought occurred to me... this was how I had survived the Tribulation!
I had seen something like this, but it was on such a smaller scale when I was fighting the Arcanists. Their bodies had been destroyed, but their souls were able to persist for much longer, and I had known that it was because my Tribulation lightning had targeted their souls, which gave me an advantage; if not for this, trying to kill them would have been very difficult.
The Tribulation had erased me, my skin, my flesh, my bones, and I had gone on existing. I had been left with a stubborn will, a set of channels, and an Anima Depth, not even me at my strongest as an Adept could have kept me alive in this state.
I had not understood how, in the moment, but I understood it now, as I felt the pressure radiating from my soul.
This field kept my channels intact when there was no me left to keep them intact. It is why I grew back out of the channels, and it was such a weird experience, because I was realizing that I had to rebuild what I know about what could truly hurt me as an Arcanist.
I sat with that too. It was a strange feeling, being told by your own soul that it had decided to keep you alive without consulting you. Grateful, mostly, a little unnerved, both true.
And there was a third thing, smaller, that I only noticed because of the quiet, and it was the fact that I could no longer smell the stench of darkness in the back of my throat.
The damned Law of Darkness that had lived in my channels every loop from the first instant I opened my eyes in the vat was now stopped at the edge of the field. I could feel it pressing against it, but the sphere kept it away.
For the first time since I first woke in this facility, I had opened my eyes, and I could breathe, and this did not give me as much joy as I thought it would, but I did not take it for granted, because I had learned exactly what it was worth by living without it.
The fox was still curled up inside me; she seemed asleep. Perhaps the shift to four tails was more profound than I thought. As for the Hollow Avatar, I could see that the darkness in its room was slowly recovering, but it had not yet returned.
My Anima Depth was glowing inside my chest; it resembled a full bright moon, and my channels, which were connected to it, had the same glow. It was as if this was my body, and everything outside of it, my flesh and bones, were just added extras... I decided that this feeling would never not unnerve me.
My body felt incredibly different, and if I were to go through the changes one by one, it would take me days, but I had a much quicker way to determine my growth.
I called up my status screen.