Published at 26th of July 2026 10:42 am

Chapter 367: Ascension

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Nicolai held out his left forearm, gazing down at it. He pressed the tip of the scalpel to a point just below his inner elbow, a place where hed removed his subdermal armour, and observed as it sliced into his flesh. There was surprisingly little pain as he cut into the cubital vein. His eyes remained placid, his focus on his Soul Sense. With it suffusing his body he felt everything in his armflesh and bone, wire and titanium, and, his current focus, the arteries and veins.

Had there been light he would have seen the water mixing with blood, leaking out in streams, stirred by the movement of water into whirls. The blood would be dark, lacking oxygen, as hed cut a vein.

He switched the scalpel to the hand of his cut arm and repeated the process on the other side. This time he went for an artery, the brachial, which was similarly located. At the inner elbow, both arteries and veins were quite close to the surface, so neither of the cuts were deep, though it was typically preferred to go for the radial artery in the wrist, which was a little more accessible. Cultivators put quite a bit of importance into symmetry and hed come to know that it did indeed have a measurable effect at times like this.

While blood spilled from his arms, he sheathed the scalpel and tucked it back into the bag, then pulled free a heavy clump of glittering crystal. It was formed from eighty percent silver shardache, twenty percent gold shardache.

He let the bag float away, but kept a grip on the shardache as he turned his focus internal once again. Under his bidding, a Symbiote emerged from his heart Node and thence from under his skin, appearing before his chest. For the first time, there was light.

The Toothbearer Blood Symbiote was a small, angry-looking being giving off a pale glow. It took up position between his arms, then with a flick of his wrist he sent the shardache drifting toward it. The Toothbearer Blood Symbiote moved into the ball, passing effortlessly through solid crystal, and now its light was something scintillating, shining out from the crystal mass, reaching somehow into it. The ball of crystal stopped moving, locking into position between his loosely extended arms, held with palms up.

His Soul pulsed, Oma roving through it. The blood in the water condensed and was tugged from many loose strands into one, as though an invisible rope-weaver had collected them together. The strands began a single, thick string. It came from the cut artery on his left arm, wove through the water and on into the glowing ball of shardache, which turned mottled, shadowed, as it drank the blood. The blood filtered through the crystal, found the Symbiote, passed through, and emerged on the other side. There the string stretched down towards his right arm, returned to his body through the cut vein.

The string of blood had a faint glow to it, a kind of barrier that held it apart from the water around it. Still, all this seemed a fantastic way to develop a murderous blood infection, but Nicolai had been assured that the Toothbearer Blood Symbiote would deal with that, ensuring that the blood shed any contaminants before returning to his body. Regardless, by this point he had enough implants not to fear such a thing even if it hadnt.

The blood returned to him changed, nevertheless, by its passage through the crystal ball. He breathed slow, working to rein in his heart. His internal monitor told him it had risen to 43bpm, over his average resting. He did not want it to beat too quickly. He had to make sure that this process went on at a slow and steady rate.

From his heart, lung, and kidney Nodes, a glow was spreading through his Soul. At first separate, these glows met and merged into one that expanded until the whole of his Soul was suffused in it. That occurred at the very same moment the first of the altered blood returned to his heart.

It felt as though the ground shifted beneath his feet, the bottom dropping out of his Soul. A stability hed taken for granted since he completed his Seed was rapidly dissolving, his Soul turning loose and diffuse.

His focus turned as sharp as the scalpel. The Modules launched into action, already setting to work on the changes they wished to see made to his Soul. Nicolai himself did not start immediately. Instead, he maintained focus, ensuring he was holding everything steady, ensuring he had a good grasp of the process.

During the next minutes or hours he would face many crises, and all needed to be dealt with as quickly and smoothly as possible. The longer a crisis lingered, the more latent potential would be sucked away.

Hed hoped to calm himself, settle his mind, but it was difficult. His Nodes and his Soul were shifting, a sensation that was impossible to get used to, and this strangeness infected him, made perfect calm impossible.

There was nothing for it but to get started on his side goal, Engraving his Soul to better resist the Dark. The amount of time he had to do this was measured by the shardache and the Toothbearer Blood Symbiote before him. Together, they formed the source of energy that would drive this process, while the Symbiotes in his torso Nodes acted as a guiding force. The shardache ball would shrink, and the Symbiotes light would dim. When both were gone, the process would be over. If all went well, he would be Tier 2, with a bright Soul, and all the Engravings he and the Modules planned on. If things hadnt gone well the result could be anything from somewhat bad to extremely bad.

He knew he had a good amount of timethe Toothbearer Blood was the best for this, and he had the maximum amount of shardache one could use, in the perfect ratio of gold to silver. But already, he saw the edges of the shardache shrinking, as though being nibbled away by invisible ants.

It took him a few precious moments to work out how to even grasp his Soul in the first place. It was like doing surgery on yourself in the dark, using implements that were slowly morphing into different forms. Fortunately, once he wrapped his head around the complexity of the task, he found that the other primary tool needed was something he possessed in spades: willpower.

His mind bore down on his Soul, and the changes he desired began to come about.

Time slipped by, counted out in the gradual shrinkage of the shardache ball. At first, the process was smooth, and he was free to focus much of his attention on shifting his Soul to match his designs.

Then, all at once, that changed.

His only warning was a sudden jerk from one part of his Soul. It spasmed like a strained muscle. A random burst of Oma was thrown out of him, detonating in the water to his side, and the ball of crystal floating between his arms was knocked out of position, the string of blood broken.

Nicolais teeth grit, his breath hissing into the mask as he focused. He could not move, physicallyhe had to stay perfectly still while his Soul was in this state. But he had control of the Toothbearer Blood Symbiote, which in turn had control over the ball of shardache, and he guided it back into position. From there, the strings of blood reconnected.

However, he had only just got it back into place, doing his best not to think on how much latent potential hed lost in that brief moment, when one of his lung Nodes abruptly began to swell, in a manner that looked extremely bad. The Symbiote within it, which had been holding steady in its activation, was buffeted by waves within the Nodes and it fell out of position. The Art that seven Symbiotes were weaving together was interrupted.

His Soul around that Node went into what could only be described as meltdown. Breaking, hardening, tearing, going wrong in a dozen different ways. It only took him a millisecond to force the Symbiote back into its spot and get it active again, but it took him almost an entire minute of intense focus to drain excess energy from the Node to sette the swelling, then knead the area of turbulent Soul back into order. This was exactly the kind of issue which, if managed as the Simple Ascension suggested, could have its nastier side effect plucked away, leaving it as a source of stability. But that source of stability would swallow up latent potential. He smoothed it out and the crisis was removed.

He turned his focus back to the changes he was enacting on his Soul. Without his active attention, the Engraving had begun to reverse, and once more his mind bore down as he found the shapes hed been teasing into existence, corrected the places theyd slipped, then continued his working. But it was not long before there was another random flurry of energy, another small crisis he had to solve.

Nicolais attention began to be split multiple ways. He did his best to keep the changes going wherever he could, but more and more he had to turn his focus towards tiny crises that, if ignored, would swiftly rise into true catastrophes.

But it was at this point that two of the Modules returned to him. In his state of manic focus, he wasnt even sure which ones, only that he felt them as small hands that worked alongside him. That gave him time to demand the Mask work too, and he struggled to control his rage when it refused, simply waiting. No amount of dire promises got it to leave its current position. He could not understand what it was waiting for, or why.

He had no time to try to work it out. The process of solving one problem after another consumed him. The rate at which catastrophes and crises appeared was growing as he came toward the midpoint of the Ascension, and it was all he could do to manage them while directing whatever attention he could spare to the Engraving.

It was becoming very clear to him why the vast majority of Cultivators never achieved a bright Soul, why in fact most of them didnt even try.

He used his Soul to control his Nodes. Through his Nodes he controlled Oma and Symbiotes. And right now, both his Soul and his Nodes were actively changing, even while he used them to try and control the process.

It was like trying to upgrade a large and complex power plant in the most senseless way possible. Obviously, the smart thing to do was to turn everything off while performing the upgrade. But in this case, it was impossible. The only way was for that power plant to provide the power the machines working on it needed, even as walls were being torn down and new chambers built. It was impossible for something not to go wrong. All one could do was handle those problems as quickly and fluidly as possible.

And yet Nicolai had expected this. He had known it would be like this, and he had known that attaining a bright Soul was often almost impossible. One had to sort the problems quickly, and that was what he was doing. None of the crises had become true catastrophes, and hed thus far managed to avoid having more crises at once than he could handle. Another Module returned to him, and with that extra hand, all of a sudden, things were almost going well.

He was beginning to experience the faintest flush of anticipatory success, as he saw that the ball of shardache was halfway spent, and felt that the changes he had been pushing through his Soul were beginning to accrue, beginning to turn into something real. He and the Modules were doing it!

And it was then, of course, that the Dark, which had been slumbering until that point, awoke with a start and began to peer around. It looked at him, looked at what he was doing to his Soul, and with only that it seemed to grasp precisely what he was doing. An instant later it decided it was not happy about what it saw. Then it lunged for him.

The Dark slammed into him and the perfect little house of cards hed steadily been building throughout the process flew apart in a beautiful, horrible mess.

His eyes bulged, his teeth clenched tight and his lips spread in a bloodless, furious grimace, breath hissing between his teeth as he tangled with it, his spirit twisting and writhing and bulging.

A burst of Oma knocked the shardache from its position between his hands. One of his Nodes was going nuclear. Part of his Soul was attempting to detach.

Nicolai, with the few Modules aiding him, attempted to solve all of these problems and fight the Dark. The strain on his mind reached a new peak. His eyes rolled, froth boiled from between his lips, his enhanced musculature was tense like he was tasered, the hardware limit warnings his internal monitors threw up ignored.

His Soul was something alive and squirming, a place in which a war was raging, even as he did everything he could to keep it smooth, keep the process going. His mouth mumbled control control control. But a limit had been reached, surpassed, and

The Mask, which had been wriggling like a cat, setting itself just so, exploded into motion. It traced an arc like a shooting star through his mind, slammed into the dark, and like a pair of cats they rolled around, hissing and biting at one another. At that moment, Nicolai could not remember ever feeling more grateful to it. Its timing had been perfect, the move it had been preparing to make since the start effective beyond all expectations.

The Dark was punched away from all problems, and the Mask used its advantage of surprise to keep it pinned. That wouldnt last, but for now it was just what he needed.

Nicolai was in an almost nirvana like state. His whole world had narrowed down to the problems to be solved. He and his attendant Modules began to pull everything back together.

In a sudden, shocking burst, the scout Symbiote in his heart died. It simply burst apart, the vast strain that his Soul was placing it under popping it like a balloon.

But he was not surprised. This, at least, was an expected problem. The other scout Symbiote had been waiting right behind it, and instantly it was slotting into place, taking up the position the other had held.

He had known this would happen. Typically one would use a smaller amount of shardache than he had. But hed learned a secret in the Cultivator game, which revolved around using not one but two sets of these Symbiotes and a greater amount of shardache, lengthening the Ascension but providing more latent potential. Considering what had just happened, he needed that more than ever.

Then, as though they were colluding with one another, all the remaining Symbiotes likewise burst apart. Their replacements were right behind, but this burst sent out a wave through his Soul, one that knocked into the struggling Mask and Dark.

He had no attention to spare for the sight of a sparkling energy venting from the dead Symbiotes, merging into his Nodes. The Dark was tearing its way free of the Mask. The fight was back on.

Nicolai lost all sense of self. There was only the process, the endless battle with the Dark, his ally the Mask, the burning need to keep everything stable, the dreadful pressure and paranoia, his attempts to keep Engraving whenever he had a moment. There was no rest, only more crises and his frantic need to end them as soon as possible, aware of something just out of sightthe ticking of something called latent potential, which he was both accruing and losing in a constant back and forth struggle.

He needed a bright Soul. He refused anything less. And he needed the Engraving, now more than ever.

There was no room for anything else. His entire being became these two goals and the striving to complete them. His entire world was this Soul, these Nodes, these Symbiotes, and the beings he shared this space with. The Dark, who opposed him because he sought to control it. The Mask, who helped him fight it. And, slowly, the growing number of helpful hands belonging to the Modules.

There had been only two at the beginning, little minds with their own little pieces of Soul who worked alongside him, who helped him with whatever problems he faced. They could solve minor crises entirely by themseves. They could aid him against the Dark. They could hold the changes he was enacting on his Soul firm, stop his Engraving from unravelling the moment he turned his attention somewhere else.

And as the ball of Shardache shrank, so did more of these beings appear. One by one, they sprang up. Bit by bit, they completed the work theyd focused on in various corners of his Soul, and they came and joined him.

Soon there were four, which became six. Then there were eight, and within them and the Mask beside him he felt an unstoppable momentum building, felt the latent potential coming in an almost uninterrupted flow as crisis after crisis was adroitly solved, as the Dark was cordoned off by the joined efforts of the Mask and four Modules.

The Engraving was reaching completion. And the Dark, realising it had lost, began to fall away and slink back towards sleep, freeing up more Modules. The Mask, untrusting, remained as a guardian hovering over it, ready should it rise.

And then the process, which as it approached the end only grew harder, the rate of crises increasing, became surprisingly smooth. With all those hands Nicolai wasnt struggling, not anymore. He would have marvelled at just how easy it had become, were it not for a deep-seated belief that the universe has a cruel sense of humour, and that thoughts like that presented very tempting targets.

Regardless, the process smoothed. Crises after crises was averted practically before they started, the entirety of his will and every single Module fixing onto each one the instant it appeared.

As he had more time to think, he realised more had changed than he had expected. The Dark had changed. It had failed to stop him making the changes he wanted to make, and he would have an advantage against itbut just as his Soul had changed and evolved, so too had the Dark. Somewhere in its fighting with him, it had somehow sharpened itself, grown stronger in its own way. So too, in fact, had the Mask through its battle with the Dark. The Thrill, deep in the centre of his Soul, had been quietly shifting in its own way.

The only thing which hadnt changed, and he was glad for that, was the poison construct set into his heart, heart Node, and Soul around that area. It had merely adjusted itself slightly during his Ascension, remaining firmly rooted, but otherwise there were no changes. Grudgingly, he would admit the thing was well made for its purpose of keeping him bound to the Queen but allowing him to grow in strength. Hed worried it would cause him some trouble here.

The shardache puffed away, the last of it exhausted. The light emanating from the Toothbearer Blood Symbiote died, dissolving into a stream of light that merged with his blood and fed into him.

With that, the set of Symbiotes spread through his torso Nodes sensed that their time had come. They burst apart, dying just as the ones they had replaced had. And from them came more sparkling energies that settled into his Nodes.

The other Nodes throughout his body had already settled, taken on firm new states, but these Nodes, of the heart, lungs, and kidneys, were special. As they advanced to Tier 2 they grew more than simply a greater capacity to hold Oma, and the strength to hold Tier 2 Symbiotes.

The black twist in the centre of his heart node grew and shifted, becoming larger and stranger.

Meanwhile his two lungs Nodes grew their own versions, strange things like a knot repeating on itself, only it had great openings here and there, almost like the mouths of trumpets. These began to suck, and already he felt the Aura in the water around him being pulled slightly, knew that his lungs had become far better at breathing in and absorbing Aura.

In his kidney Nodes, yet more little shining knots appeared and grew at their centres. These seemed similar to that at his heart, and he felt a kind of network, like invisible lines of energy that sprung up between his heart Node and the two kidney Nodes.

His Soul settled, solid and firm and strong. The process was finished.

Encased in steel and pitch black water, Nicolai breathed deep and slow through his mask. He was exhausted; body, mind, and Soul, all utterly spent. He hardly had the energy to begin looking himself over. But he saw the Modules, each of them equally exhausted, but brimming with joy because they had done what they wanted to do. Each of them had completed the changes they had wished to engrave upon his Soul, and that drew him to look himself over, to see the shape of his Soul, and he smiled because he had managed the same.

It was hard to describe, but there was an entire structural change to his Soul, a kind of layering that had intensified around the Dark, creating a natural hierarchy. He had done it.

His Soul itself had changed in a qualitative fashion, radiating power and strength, and he knew that no more would he have to scurry around, relying on parries and misdirection against Tier 2s. Now he stood on level ground with them. His Soul Sense shifted, swelling, and like a plant growing a new leaf his second Soul Sense tendril unfurled.

But what about the most important task of all?

It was rare indeed for Nicolai to experience fear, and what he experienced wasnt quite fear, but two of fears cousins; unease and uncertainty. He remembered the many, many catastrophes. He would have said he had put them down very quickly, and he knew there was no way to prevent these things from happening. And if the challenge was how quickly and how effectively one could deal with them, then surely he had succeeded. Surely he had done well.

However, this was a binary matter. He had done well, but had he done well enough? He could not know until he looked.

For a moment the uncertainty made him hesitate and pull back, for what if he had failed? But the Mask, of all things, reminded him that was not who he was. A Better Man would not shy away, and he may not quite be a Better Man, but he wasnt one to cringe away, either. Nothing to do but tear off the bandaid.

He allowed his vision to slip into Soul Sense, extended it out, turned, and saw his Soul.

It shone bright as a tiny sun.

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