‘Show my catalysts’
Aspirant has discovered the following catalysts:
∞× [Life Odemid]
∞× [Lightning Halide]
∞× [Lightning Odemid]
∞× [Spirit Odemid]
∞× [Will Halide]
∞× [Will Odemid]
≥1000× [Conductivity Halide]
≥1000× [Crystal Tocam]
≥1000× [Current Halide]
≥1000× [Dexterity Odemid]
≥1000× [Dexterity Tocam]
≥1000× [Life Halide]
≥1000× [Light Odemid]
≥1000× [Mana Odemid]
≥1000× [Mind Halide]
≥1000× [Power Halide]
≥1000× [Vitality Halide]
≥1000× [Will Odemid]
990× [Arc Odemid]
990× [Sharpness Halide]
900× [Vitality Tocam]
890× [Flux Odemid]
820× [Arc Halide]
800× [Charge Halide]
800× [Flux Halide]
730× [Ruthless Halide]
720× [Spirit Halide]
660× [Strength Tocam]
540× [Endurance Tocam]
530× [Growth Halide]
490× [Will Tocam]
460× [Focus Odemid]
440× [Life Tocam]
385× [Toughness Tocam]
380× [Force Halide]
350× [Decisive Halide]
300× [Clarity Odemid]
280× [Cruel Halide]
250× [Speed Halide]
240× [Regeneration Halide]
220× [Breath Odemid]
220× [Breath Tocam]
220× [Dynamic Halide]
195× [Menace Halide]
190× [Breath Halide]
180× [Breath Tocam]
180× [Presence Odemid]
160× [Cunning Halide]
140× [Perception Odemid]
120× [Nature Halide]
110× [Decay Halide]
110× [Passion Halide]
100× [Virility Tocam]
[...]
43× [Purification Halide]
1x [Disintegration Halide]
1x [Time Halide]
[Aspirant has 6 more attempts of the trial remaining.]
After devoting hours to retrieving catalysts from the wreckage of rock, crystal, and scattered body parts, Ori passed out, only to wake up back at the Lifewell. Whether he died naturally after his body gave out from injury and deprivation, something unseen killed him while he was unconscious, or the Crucible itself had ruled him out, the result was the same: he now had one fewer trial attempt remaining.
However, when he tallied his total collection of catalysts, the negative thoughts fell away in a surge of satisfaction. He now possessed hundreds of catalyst varieties across mind, body, and soul, some with effects he could scarcely imagine once this ordeal came to an end. For example, would the Hardness Tocams fortify his skin? Would any of this let him cast magic now, or would that still require an Awakening barred to him after forming his familiar bond with Freya?
Even so, as Ori assessed his body, he still felt a long way from being able to stand against the demons outside. He remembered how Mel had bodied him, how that ram-horned demon had crushed his leg into powder, and the impossible speed and reflexes of even the grunts.
If the refinement process at the end of this did not leave him able to zap them with magic afterwards, Ori suspected he was still, in practical terms, fucked.
Beneath the list was an option Ori was not sure what to do with.
[Aspirant has met the threshold to fuse catalysts to create Essences of higher rank. Fuse Catalysts?]
“What are the essences of higher rank, and how will they affect refinement?” Ori asked the Crucible. He had some inkling thanks to Freya’s knowledge, but he asked anyway, hoping for something more specific to his situation. The query was met with silence. He shrugged, then decided to sleep on this decision for now, hoping the usual rule held true: higher rank and greater rarity meant better results.
His body had been restored to pristine health, and several draughts from the fountain had revitalised everything physical. His mind, however, was still drained despite passing out during the previous trial. There was a serious time pressure while he resided in this room; however, compared to the trial environments, here he was as safe, quiet, alone, and with nothing to do but rest. Unable to resist sleep any longer, he sat beside the fountain and let himself fall into his first real sleep in weeks.
Ori had always been a lucid dreamer. Where most people’s dreams rose unbidden from the deepest crevices of the mind, Ori Suba could design his first. As a child, that made it hard to relate to the shared basics of dreaming: the strange, happy fantasies of winning the lottery, or the nightmares of monsters, loss, and violence.
Before his tenth birthday, Ori’s nights were often dreamless. Then, after a particularly bad birthday, he made his first dream, drawn from half-remembered fragments of a father, an imagined mother he had never known, and a loving family he could seemingly not have. When he woke, it felt like discovering a bittersweet gift: a door to alternate realities, a way into better lives and better versions of himself. For most of his pre-adolescence, the waking world became an interval between dreams, a stretch of hours spent planning the next descent into sleep.
Later, Ori began to create and test nightmares. He let his subconscious twist unpleasant memories into something truly frightening, replaying his worst fears and the choices he regretted the most. He also used dreams to explore the hidden corners of life, the paths not taken, the unvisited rooms and buildings, running simulations of opportunities and possibilities with a hopeful outlook, though one still grounded in reality.
Now, resting on the plinth beside the Lifewell fountain, Ori’s body lay still as his mind slipped back into the trial. In the dream, his longing to discover what lay beyond the forest pulled him towards that distant edge of the horizon that seemed to curve up into the sky.
Here, Ori was not bound by gravity, friction, or effort. He could watch without being watched, shaping the world into something vague or vivid as his mood demanded. Yet this time, the sights he found while soaring above the canopy somehow exceeded the limits of his imagination.
The landscape rose until it towered beyond the clouds. It was not like mountains or any natural ridge of stone and soil. The land looked curled back on itself, like a ring or halo, climbing into the skies. He rose through shifting bands of cloud and dreamlike ecosystems, each haunting in its behaviour and form. Even without a physical body, he felt the damp mist as he passed gas-bag jellyfish drifting above the cloudline.
He soared into the highest reaches, discovering peculiar creatures and increasingly abstract biomes as time stretched with a dream’s strange, intangible finiteness.
Golden, bird-like beings, adorned with an unsettling number of human eyes, wheeled around him. Droplets from celestial waterfalls transformed into stars, indistinguishable from the Milky Way. The essences of magic seemed to ride on light itself, glowing vapours twisting and flowing with the jet stream.
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Then the sky darkened as the thin blue line between the earth and the heavens sharpened into a razor. The sparse, twinkling constellations resolved into whole landscapes of nebulae and actinic light. Spectral curtains of aurora became tangible slivers he could touch. When he shaped an astral hand from night and starlight, catalysts of Light, elongated and diaphanous as rods, vanished on contact, just as they would have in the trial.
“Is this my dream, or am I actually in the trial right now?” Ori wondered, drifting through his astral body. He did not want to be back in the trial. The trial meant danger, challenge, and strife. This was meant to be his refuge, his brief pocket of peace and freedom.
How dare the Crucible intrude!
As if answering his displeasure, clouds boiled up into anvil-shaped thunderheads that sparked and seethed with potential. Ori clenched at the feeling of rage, and a crimson jet of lightning erupted upwardsfrom the clouds below, streaking past him towards the dancing lights of the ion wind.
“Alright then,” Ori said, his anger draining into bemusement as he watched a wake of glittering catalysts drift behind the bolt. The thought of collecting them one by one felt absurdly tedious, so he simply inhaled them. In his dream, he decided, he made the rules.
Then he looked up at the stars and wondered: what if?
This was deus ex somnium, a god in his own dream, and yet some instinct held him back from pushing too far, from breaking the unspoken agreement that this was only a dream and not something else. It unnerved him that he didn’t know where the dream truly came from, which meant he might not be in full control.
But the dream was already thinning. If there was ever a moment to try something reckless, it was now, on the edge of waking. His dream-self judged it impossible, only to be overruled by the part of him that could not resist a good idea on paper. With reasoning that felt sound in the moment, touching a star became audacious rather than impossible.
In the waking world, nothing travels faster than light, one of the first hard limits anyone with even a loose connection to physics learns. Conservation of mass and energy, causality, the laws of thermodynamics: not just prohibitions, but the scaffold that lets humanity understand and predict anything at all.
And yet there were loopholes. Even without magic, two stars can recede from each other faster than light, not because either breaks the limit, but because space expands between them. So, by applying that in reverse…
Ori flexed reality.
He treated the void between stars like air, compressible, able to shrink, and made it so. At first, nothing changed. He could feel space folding, distances tightening, while the bluish star he reached for, bright as Venus at night, stayed a fixed pinprick.
Then the universe detonated with fifty-two years’ worth of blue-shifted starlight all at once. The glare would have flash-boiled Earth’s oceans if this had been anything but a dream. Even Ori’s godlike astral form felt the scorch of Doppler-shifted radience.
And then a stellar prominence, large enough to swallow Earth, belched from the star. Laced with catalysts too bright to separate, the plasma filament, driven by magnetic winds, bathed him in charged particles.
He did it again and again, hauling stars in from the far reaches of the cosmos in a dream as abstract and surreal as any he had ever shaped.
He felt like Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, conducting forces he did not understand. At one point, two stars collided and went supernova, making every light show beforehand look tame.
Catalysts swarmed by the thousand, fizzing when brought close. Each sweep of his astral body left creases of light that rippled out and condensed into Photon, Aura, Aurora, Luminance, Iridescence, and Radiance, which he inhaled with every breath. Rarer still were the main paracausal energies of Fate, and their catalytic echoes: Peritia, Mana, Aether, Quintessence, Breath, and Grace.
He sensed them as flavours beyond taste, colours he could not see yet still named blue, red, or gold, except that Mana-blue and Aether-blue were as different from each other as red was from green.
However, it was Quintessence, silver and insistent, that stole his attention. It felt solid, tangible, more indivisible than anything he had ever known while awake, as if it were proof against the soft unreality of the dream. Something that could only be real, whether this was a dream or not.
It resonated with him like nothing else ever had, a call that sparked and fed the part of him he rarely had room to indulge, his creativity. He willed more of it into existence and condensed it alongside the lesser essences of magic and light. If the Crucible could fuse catalysts into rarer essences, why could he not do the same here? Not just fuse, but transform, to make something new.
Mana answered the mind, aether beat in time with buried desire. Peritia filled his lungs with the blessing of life. Grace coated his astral skin in gold, sharpening his presence. But Quintessence did not respond to want or need. It felt like a summons from the universe itself, a promise that fate was not yet written, that even the laws governing stars could be changed with enough will.
He imagined a whirlpool of light, and under the pressure of his will, it vitrified, turning dense and clear. As the dream’s twilight gathered, a sudden thought struck him, perilous in its simplicity.
What if I could create stars?
It was as easy as anything else.
A blue hypergiant bloomed into being, blazing with the light of two million suns. A stellar prominence arched above him in looping coils of charged plasma at scales beyond comprehension. He felt light, heat, the pressure of energy, and understood power, understood creation at its most primordial. How when that star’s short life ended, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ordinary stars would be born from its ashes, along with clouds that would one day become worlds.
From ashes, life.
Yet Ori knew what came after the brief flare of starbirth: a long, cold quiet.
Except that was not how this universe or this reality called Fate, worked.
Dream logic and Quintessence pushed catalysts and lesser essences into rarer, stranger states, while stellar nucleosynthesis did its patient work: hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, then oxygen, neon, silicon, the lighter elements, until iron marked the limit and the core began to fail. The star swelled, then tightened, then the dream turned inside out.
Ori flinched because he knew what was coming. Like the first trial, his mind stayed open, receptive to the sensation of Fate itself being rewritten. It was as if the light of the universe’s soul had been laid bare, a radiance that transcended creation and destruction, infinity and eternity in his hands, a foundation beneath existence and possibility. Had this been in the waking world, Ori's soul would have been scattered across the cosmos, but in the dream, his avatar, his sense of self held.
Standing within the shattered remnants of a star, Ori reached out and touched that strange, profound light, and like the Quintessence he had used to form the star, it was far too real to belong in a dream.
And then he woke.
As the dream’s detail dissolved into wakefulness, Ori shook his head at how utterly different the experience had been from any dream he had ever had. Then he decided to answer the Lifewell’s question, posed just after the trial, the one that had only grown more insistent since he fell asleep.
[Aspirant has met the threshold to fuse catalysts to create Essences of higher rank. Fuse Catalysts?]
‘Alright,’ Ori thought, still groggy. ‘Fuse.’
His mind rang, as if he were a church bell struck hard with a steel forge hammer. He groaned as something inside him buzzed, stretched, tightened, and shone all at once.
When it ended, he found himself guzzling water from the fountain, gasping as if he had gone days without a drink.
“What the fuck?” Ori said aloud, trying to make sense of the sudden pain and disorientation. Because it had not happened within a trial, fear of a true death spiked through his head.
After catching his breath, regaining clarity and remembering his purpose, a familiar urgency shoved him forward as he prepared to go back in. Before he began visualising his next trial, Ori gave the Crucible its familiar command.
‘Show my catalysts’
Astral Aspirant has discovered the following essences: (now showing only evolved catalysts and essences, Immortal rank or higher)]
+∞ [Astral]
+∞ [*#Unknown#*]
+∞ [*#Unknown#*]
∞ [Aether]
∞ [Celestial]
∞ [Domain]
∞ [Mana]
≥1000× [Quintessence]
(Trace) [Material]
(Trace) [Elemental]
(Trace) [Polydexterity]
(Trace) [Void]
Astral Aspirant has 4 more attempts of the trial remaining.
“...the fuck?” Ori whispered in astonishment. For a long time, all he could do was stare into space and wonder if this was still part of the dream.
“Whoyh-yo? Ah… yes… I suppose you are something intriguing, at least by this age’s standards.” A slow, resonant voice answered.
