NOVEL NEXT Chapter 78 - The Gift's Refusal
I stood there, gaze flicking between the colossal tower of stone and my System's Prompts.
[You have successfully proven yourself in the Trial of Sand.]
[Time Elapsed: 1 hour and 11 minutes (NEW RECORD)(Previous Record: 6 hours 21 minutes)]
[Will Resonance Achieved: 100% (NEW RECORD) (Previous Record: 50%)]
[The Blacksand Monolith acknowledges these immense feats.]
[Calculation for Reward Distribution has begun...]
I was utterly confused. If the previous record for Will Resonance was only 50%...that meant achieving 100% Resonance wasn't what was needed to clear the Trial...so...how exactly was the Trial of Sand supposed to play out?
Intisak...what the hell have you been planning?
I wanted to figure out just what the hell it was he expected would happen here, but I had no leads. Just the inkling that it should have allowed him to somehow confirm my claims with better veracity than if he had been watching me fight in the wilderness...
To fully understand his intentions, I'd need to first understand the Trial I'd unintentionally aced. But clearly, the Obelisk didn't care about my understanding---only my performance.
I watched the pulsing obelisk for a while, before realizing....
The Main Mind!
My eyes scanned the surroundings hurriedly, but the Blacksand Scorpion was nowhere to be seen. A dreadful thought came to me.
Is it...dead? Did it fall into the collapsing ground when the Obelisk rose up? What happened? No, what's supposed to happen?
You're overreacting. I'm right here.
...
It appeared I was indeed, overreacting, because according to the Main Mind, it had promptly returned to me the moment the Obelisk broke through the ground.
But why couldn't I remember that myself? And why was I able to now...talk to myself, as if it were a separate existence entirely? How is it that the Main Mind now knew things I did not? Like we were no longer the same person?
I had many questions, and not many answers.
Surprisingly, it was the System that gave them to me.
[Construction of the Host's "Mindscape" is underway. As such, Host's Minds' consciousnesses have been temporarily separated from each other. Full Function will return once the Mindscape is ready.]
[Current Progress: 34%]
Mindscape..? What is that?
[The Mindscape is a mental space that can hold multiple different consciousnesses, allowing the Host to reap the benefits of Dual Consciousnesses, whilst maintaining the cohesive thought-process of Dual Minds.]
Dual Consciousnesses? How is that different to Dual Minds?
[Dual Consciousness would be akin to having to two entirely separate versions of yourself within the same body, each with their own emotions, goals and memories, that aren't shared with the other.]
...I see...Dual Minds is certainly far more desirable than that...but then, what are these benefits you spoke of?
[Through the use of a Mindscape, the Host can maintain dual personalities, and thereby gain the ability to perceive reality from the perspectives of two entirely different people. However, the thought process and understanding of these different perspectives will remain shared, cohesive, and instantly accessible, as if they were dual minds instead.]
Hmmm...I think I understand now.
[You are welcome, Master.]
I often forgot how Human-like the System could sound at times, despite the cold tone it often used. I looked back to the Obelisk expectantly, and right on cue, the columns of runes and patterns pulsed with that golden light, and more System Prompts appeared before me.
[Reward Calculation has been completed.]
[For Maximum benefits to the Challenger, the Authority of the Rewards for the three accomplishments of "Passing the Trial of Sand", "Attaining the Clearance Record" and "Attaining the Resonance Record" have been combined into a Singular Reward.]
[Reward: Epic-Grade Bloodline "Blacksand Scorpion"]
My eyes widened in shock. Bloodline...? How does that even work?
[Distribution of Rewards has begun.]
I staggered, breath locked somewhere between inhale and scream.
Something cold and dry was being poured into my bloodstream, like fine grains that scrape through tubing not built to carry them.
The System mentioned rewards...I was only given pain.
Every artery turned to glass.
Then cracked.
I dropped to one knee, nails digging into the sand as the pressure built beneath my skin. The first pulse struck my heart like a hammer of stone, sending a shockwave that rattled through my ribs. I heard it before I felt it—a crunch, then a split. My own bones groaning as the foreign essence bored into them.
[Implantation Phase One: Musculo-Skeletal Re-alignment]
It wasn't pain in the usual sense. It was intrusion...no, instruction---data written straight into the body.
My marrow hardened. Ligaments braided themselves tighter. The whites of my eyes darkened.
But before the transformation could go any further, my Gift detected it.
Damage.
My body convulsed once---twice---and then began healing.
Reverting everything the bloodline was trying to establish.
Cells that had just turned black peeled back into pink.
Marrow that had petrified softened again.
The process reversed.
And the moment some sense of stability returned, the Bloodline resumed its work.
Change. Revert. Change. Revert.
Endless. Mechanical. Recursive.
Every second was a thousand cycles of evolution and erasure, overlapping until I couldn't tell whether I was alive or being rewritten out of existence.
The System prompts blurred at the edge of my vision. My Gift wasn't meant to fight something like this. It was meant to adapt. But adaptation required injury, and this was injury multiplied beyond meaning.
Each pulse of my heart folded me in half until I collapsed to the ground, unable to move, body convulsing with every cycle of change and reversion.
Every fiber of muscle was being sculpted and shredded simultaneously.
Every nerve was firing two conflicting truths: that it was dying, and that it had already healed.
The Obelisk's light flared, as if its work was complete, and my reward had been granted. And I could tell it was supposed to be a reward...one that would have allowed me to change into and wield the colossal form of a Blacksand Scorpion.
Only, my Gift refused to yield the reins.
Every change induced was seen as a threat.
So the transformation became a war between two systems: one rewriting me into something new, the other rewriting me back into what I'd been.
And I was the battlefield.
Each unit of flesh split open and darkened, forming a sub-dermal layer—black, glossy, segmented.
A scorpion's carapace, but inside-out.
The exoskeleton formed underneath the skin, pushing outward in patches like erupting plates. It coated muscle fibers in microscopic armor, turning every contraction into the grinding of metal cords. The sensation wasn't external, it was internal friction, a thousand joints folding where none should exist.
But my Gift matched it step for step.
The plates dissolved. The flesh beneath reformed to compensate. Denser fibers. Reinforced sheathing.
Adaptation upon adaptation.
Every failure was burned into success.
The surface of my body rippled violently. My skin alternated between human and insectile, shifting with each heartbeat.
One instant pale, the next, black as obsidian.
That constant stream of grain-like particles and data into my body finally ended, leaving my body to continue the battle with all that was within.
[The Epic-Grade Bloodline of the Blacksand Scorpion has been granted in full.]
[Initiating return...]
Even in my half-conscious state of endless torment, with my body continuing to shift in and out of beast form whilst continually adapting, the increasingly blinding light of the Obelisk did not escape me.
It pulsed, almost in rhythm with the cycles of my regeneration, growing brighter and brighter, from a dull gold, to a bright yellow, to a searing white, until there was nothing but the white.
Then, all at once, the world inverted.
The blackstone arena beneath me fractured into darkness, and gravity shifted. My stomach lurched as I fell into a void once again, and landed hard, rolling once before collapsing onto vantablack sand.
A familiar dryness in the air, a dull breeze, and those black dunes as far as the eye could see. And though I couldn't see very far in my current state, I instinctively knew that I'd finally returned to the Blacksand Caverns.
The impact of the fall barely registered. The pain inside drowned everything else out.
Silence fell over the dunes as the Obelisk's pulsing light died down.
But I couldn't move. Couldn't speak.
All I could do was twitch and convulse as the metamorphosis continued.
Over and over, my muscles, bones, tendons and ligaments, were coated in that exoskeleton, then dissolved, regenerated, coated, all in an attempt to find a balance. I suffered through the silence, incapable of even a small grunt to vent my pain.
But a deep, familiar voice slid into my mind through the quiet.
"Axel Vorous...you...have done what none before ya, and what none after ya have and will ever be able to do."
Another cycle. Torment. Torment. Torment.
"So...whatever it is dat de Monolith done granted ya....whatever it is dat ya body fights so desperately...Endure it."
"Endure it, child, for Abisai can sense it---"
A pause. Then, like the grinding of stone across metal:
"---the makings of a True Physique."