The long days arrived exactly as promised, and my next nine days were a blur of repetition, failure, and the slow, grinding process of teaching my body to do something it was never meant to do.
Movement was the problem. The earth I could hold, but the moment my feet shifted, the connection tore. It did not matter how careful I was, or how slowly I moved; the ground seemed to actively resist being dragged along with me. Every step was a reset, and every reset cost me pain and discomfort as I reconnected from the start.
There is no clever way to write down nine days of the same failure, and I am not going to invent one for the journal. I stood, I connected, I lifted, I shifted my weight, and the earth let go of me with that small rude snap like a dog that always bites the same finger.
However, what did change was the arithmetic. By the third day I could reconnect with the earth in three minutes. By the sixth, in under two. On the ninth day I stood in the stance and had the ground under me in forty seconds, and I could pull it up nearly a foot across a patch the width of my shoulders.
I had learnt my lesson, and I made sure I did not sink entirely into the task, so I could always be updated about my growth, since every bit I gained helped to push me forward.
Earth Resonance: 79 → 88 (Adept)
In the blink of an eye, I was reaching the peak of Adept; just one more point and my Earth Resonance would reach 89. An average Adept would spend their entire lives trying to reach this point, and most of them would fail. They had fourteen primary channels, while I had thousands that were more powerful than theirs, and it was in moments like these that I fully understood those distinctions.
I believed I may be locked inside here for nine months, and I think I had spent more than a month inside this place, and if not for the permanent darkness that surrounded me, I liked the solitude and the struggle to find meaning behind this mystery.
I think it says a lot about my life that being imprisoned in an infinite space of darkness was somehow preferable to what was facing me outside of it.
∞
On the tenth day I stopped, because I had begun to suspect that I was solving the wrong problem. You know, in a place like this, it was very easy, alone, with nothing else to do, to mistake progress for solution.
My numbers were climbing beautifully; the time I took to reconnect with the ground had come down by a factor of thirty, and yet, I did not think that any of it had moved me one inch closer to taking a step while holding the earth, because every improvement I made was not bringing me closer to the nature of this place.
I had been focusing on one side of the equation when there were multiple sides to this, and if I ignored the other parts for too long, I would mistake progress for true understanding.
What I needed to ask myself was whether I wanted skill growth alone, without understanding, and I knew what I would pick. I was strong, but I lacked much fundamental knowledge of magic, and my foundations were shallow.
Sighing, I sat down and stared at the journal, and even though I had everything I had written down on it in my head, I read back through it from the first page, which took most of the day, and I found the sentence I had written in the middle of the fourth test and just left behind when I began making progress with the ground.
If I had a way to touch darkness the same way I was touching the earth, would I discover more connections?
∞
I closed my journal with a snap and allowed my mind to sit with this thought for a while. Two things in this place obey the same rule, which is that the thing that I hold stays, and if I let go, it would revert to its previous state.
That is the only law I have found in here that repeats across two different disciplines, so I can confidently say that this is a law about the place rather than about me.
Which means the darkness and the floor are not two separate mysteries. They are one mystery, showing me two faces.
And I have found a way to touch one of those faces, through the shell and not my magic, when I used the stance that supposedly connected me to the earth.
So the question was simple: is the darkness stone?
Obviously not; it was a stupid question on the surface, but nothing was stopping me from pursuing this line of thought. After all, I have nothing here but time.
∞
Another day, okay, two if I was honest, were spent in deliberation. Even if I wanted to access the darkness, I had nothing that could do it; even if I had spells of darkness, it would not work. The only thing that would work was my shell, and that seemed to favor the earth and not darkness.
My mind kept going in circles, and it kept returning to one moment... the stance. I had used this stance to connect with the earth, and it had never connected to any other elements as far as I knew, but this place was strange, where what my senses were perceiving was clearly different from what it truly was.
For instance, my eyes could see the ground at my feet, but none of my magical senses could perceive it; even my Earth Resonance, nearing the peak of Adept, could not feel the it unless I was channeling it through the stance.
So, I needed to ask this question again: what if in this place, the darkness was just another face of the earth and the earth was another face of darkness?
Crazy thought, but if it was true, then could it mean that there was a way for an element to take on multiple properties at the same time, or even better, be multiple things at once? It would be like water that was wet but also burned like flame and had the properties of the earth.
It was a ridiculous thought, but I was pushing too far ahead of myself.
I took the stance. Feet spread as though the ground might roll, right hand at my side, left hand up with the palm open, and I paused, following my instincts, and instead of settling downward into the floor, I settled outward, into the air, seemingly into the nothing around me.
Now, instead of trying to reach into the earth, I was reaching into the darkness with the thought that in this place, the darkness was just another face of the earth.
I held that stance for two days, and at the end of it my Earth Resonance had not moved a point, nor had my Darkness Resonance. I should have stopped right here and begun another new experiment with my other spells and abilities, but I held back and put every distraction in my head.
A month passed, and I remained with this pose...
Two months...
Four months...
And then at the beginning of the fifth month of holding this pose, my Status Screen vibrated, and a new wave of power flooded through my body.
Earth Resonance: 88 → 90 (Adept → Arcanist) Rare → Epic
Darkness Resonance: 89 → 92 (Adept → Arcanist) Rare → Epic
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