Universe's End

Chapter 214: The Climb Pt. 2

Much like the first third of the spire climb was a test in patience, the second third was much the same. For a whole year and a half, one foot in front of the other, the two founders spent most of their time within the inner workings of their own minds. For Zoey, it was time spent working on developing her mindscape. Unlike Rory, who’d taken a skill that granted him a mind palace, Zoey was expected to form one from scratch. The advantage of being tier eight was that, even without much investment in cognition, her natural growth made it possible.

Possible wasn’t the same as easy, though. Day after day, the woman spent her time trying to create a space within her mind, as if she were pulling back the curtains of darkness that appeared when she closed her eyes. Day after day, she continued to fail, but with nothing else to keep her preoccupied, she threw herself into the task that proved far more challenging than anyone realized.

Rory, meanwhile, spent his time within his established mind palace, thinking, planning, and iterating ideas.

One idea in specific.

“No, but seriously,” Rory crossed his arms within the world of his mind palace, staring at the ‘item’ before him. “Something has got to give.”

In front of him was what appeared to be a glorified box with thrusters attached to the bottom.

“See, this is like when people say if they could go back in time, how they could introduce all the advanced technologies to the ancients, only to realize they have no damn idea how they actually work,” Rory sighed. “I don’t know jack shit about aerodynamics.”

Rory often liked to take pride in how diverse his general knowledge was, with even his general understanding frequently showing depth.

But airplanes, rocket ships, and all that jazz? Yeah, Rory had no idea how they actually worked other than fuel gives thrust, and wind resistance does… stuff.

His crack at understanding how to make a flying fortress wasn’t making progress. Either he needed a literal fuel source to rely upon, or a lot of pneuma. Pearlescent cores as energy cells seemed the obvious answer, but the problem was that while they could hold a lot of pneuma, he didn’t have a good answer for filling them with the pneuma needed. It took Ehkorrus at least a year to fill a tier-eight core, and that was with a fuck ton of land passively generating pneuma, and a fuck ton of advanced pneuma crushers that had been erected throughout the city and their territory.

Regardless, his mental tabulations showed that even the most generous estimates indicated that the discrepancy between generation and flight time was egregiously one-sided. Without a city-scaled generation of pneuma, he was looking at a year to maintain flight for an hour.

Problems, problems, always problems. Needs more oomph, more efficiency, more… everything.

There was…. One idea which showed promise. The sheer volume of pneuma needed for any real flight time wasn’t practical, especially when using low-grade pneuma in its inert or gaseous form. But if he could constantly process the low-grade pneuma into liquid pneuma, the increase in potency would prove far more effective. It was one of those situations in which pneuma challenged the conventional understanding of physics, including the conservation of energy and mass. If you bottled up ten ‘units’ of base-grade pneuma and then refined it into ten units of liquid pneuma, it would be like you’d suddenly multiplied the initial energy yield by ten without any ‘additions’ outside of simply forcing the pneuma to become more ‘dense.’

Except, automatic conversion of inert grade one pneuma even into its slightly higher-grade-two gaseous pneuma was something that Rory wasn’t sure how even to begin to tackle. If it were just about the overall energy levels of the pneuma, then their volcanic home would have been drowning in gaseous pneuma. A higher energy level was a prerequisite, as he’d proven with his need to establish a core room in Ehkorrus for his liquid renewal pneuma project, but it wasn’t the entire process. Every time he’d formed higher-grade pneuma, it had required either his direct intent or the usage of a catalyst to ‘ignite’ the reaction, such as when he’d first created the Stellar Forge that would eventually become Astra.

Automatic conversion might also be the answer to my light saber problems.

Having spent months laboring on the problem, Rory was finally forced to put it on the shelf as he resumed direct control of his body, no longer leaving it on autopilot to ‘dummy’ the mental thread. Both he and Zoey had come to a stop, a year and a half of trekking since the first gate, standing outside the second gate, roughly two-thirds of the way up the spire.

“Welcome back,” Zoey chuckled as Rory cracked his neck, more out of habit than need.

“How’s building a mind palace going?”

“Awful,” Zoey snorted. “And you? What were you spending all that time doing?”

“Deciphering KFC’s herbs and spices,” Rory said without pause.

“Fun piece of Zoey lore: I never once went to a KFC,” Zoey said with a wistful sigh.

“Ehh, overrated,” Rory responded as Zoey rolled with the remark without question.

“More importantly, what do you make of this gate?” Zoey asked as she pointed to the gate, which looked nearly identical to the first.

Nearly, given there was a plaque eye level with them.

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“To Gods Above, Offer of the Hearth and its Flames.” Rory read out loud.

“What do you think that means?” Zoey asked.

Rory furrowed his brow, thinking for several seconds before he burst out in laughter.

“What? What’s so funny?”

“It’s a tollway,” Rory laughed.

“A tollway? Oh, shoot, you got change for a twenty?”

“Hardy, harr, harr,” Rory said with a deadpan voice as he rolled his eyes at his companion’s lame joke.

“Alright, so, obvious question then,” Zoey crossed her arms as she squinted at the gate. “What’s the toll?”

“Offer of the Hearth and its Flames,” Rory read out loud a second time. “I think that’s the hint.”

“Being?” Zoey questioned, scrunching up her eyebrows. “Isn’t that where stuff was normally offered, at hearths or whatever?”

“Yes, but it’s a play on words, I think,” Rory said. “Not to the hearth, but of the hearth.”

“Alright, so, grammar?” Zoey asked, still confused.

“It’s the wording. The offering is meant to be of hearth and flames.”

“Oh. Oh!” Zoey smacked her fist against the open palm of her left hand. “Alignment! It’s saying offer something with a conceptual alignment to hearth and flames.”

“Bingo,” Rory said, shooting her the finger guns.

“Do we have anything like that?”

“You’re joking, right?” Rory asked.

In response, Zoey glanced off to the side, avoiding eye contact.

“Oh heavens above,” Rory grumbled. “Zoey. Where are we?”

“In a weird pseudo-delve?”

“Okay, but where?”

“On a volcano. In a volcano? Not technically certain of the details.”

“Okay, and then what is your armor made of?” Rory asked.

“Promethium?”

“Alright, and last question. Where did I get the Nigredo and Rubedo needed to forge promethium?”

“The volcano. Ohhhhhh.”

“There you go,” Rory sighed as a bar of metal appeared in his hand. Turning to the gate, Rory raised his hand as the bar rose as if caught in a tractor beam. Hovering for a moment longer, the bar vanished, even accompanied by a rather fitting pop sound.

Waiting for the gate to open with the toll paid, the two waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“Rory?”

“You don’t have to say it,” Rory sighed. “Yeah, something is missing. I just- oh, spoke too soon.”

From the ground in front of the gate, three things begin to rise. The first was a kiln, the second a pile of rocks, and the third a scale for weighing two things against one another.

“Rory?” Zoey repeated.

“I’m thinking,” Rory muttered, tapping his foot for several seconds before sticking a finger up. “Got it.”

“Alright, and?”

“It’s a two-part toll. The first part dictates the second part. I offered a metal ingot infused with volcanic concepts by nature of being promethium.”

“Uh huh,”

“So, part two, I think it's basically saying I need to make something from scratch to prove it.”

“So, no buying your way in? Got to love a meritocracy.”

“Seems that way,” Rory agreed. “On the plus side, no monsters.”

Zoey turned around, half expecting a horde of monsters to surge out of nowhere as if to prove Rory wrong, but when nothing stirred for several seconds, Zoey relaxed.

“Except… one problem,” Rory cringed as he retracted his hand from touching the gate, getting further context on the ‘trial’ in front of them.

“Yeah?”

“Uhm…. I can’t buy both of us in.”

“Meaning?” Zoey asked, eyebrow raised.

Chuckling nervously, Rock gave a small pebble a kick over the side of the spire.

“How would you care for a crash course in the wonderful world of blacksmithing?”

Three months. That was how long it took Zoey to become a sufficient blacksmith for them both to pass through the gate. Oh sure, Rory could have passed through after handing in his very next item, but while Rory could sense he’d gotten permission, Zoey had not.

He could have left her behind, forced her to turn back, and gone on to face the King on his own, but that sounded like a fun way of committing suicide.

So, he spent three months giving Zoey his entire undivided attention as he coached her.

And dear god, she was bad.

“How the fuck can you continuously fuck this up?” Rory threw his hands up after yet another of her failures.

“I just don’t have a feel for it!” Zoey shot back. It was thankful they were provided unlimited rubedo and nigredo for the purpose of passing through the gate, or they’d have been shit out of luck with Zoey burning through all his stockpiles.

“How! You’re tier eight! The damn tier sixes have a better handle of this than you!”

“And they’ve been forging their entire lives!” Zoey countered.

Rory had to give her that. Promethium wasn’t an easy metal to work with, especially for a total novice. They’d discovered early on that if he coached her at all during the process, it invalidated the result; thus, he could only teach her and hope she’d absorbed what he’d said.

Except for problem number two, Rory wasn’t really the best teacher. Oh, sure, if it was giving lectures to people who already had a grasp of the basics and some nuance, he wasn’t the worst, but with a total novice, that went completely out the window.

All in all, when Zoey had finally managed to hammer out a dagger that allowed her to squeak through the oversized gate, the two bolted through as if afraid that Eon -or whatever was in charge of judging the gate challenge- might change their mind.

Finally, even after months of frustrated bickering, the two couldn’t help but raise their hands overhead as they brought them together in an excited high five.

“You’re not a total failure!” Rory had cheered, the two giddy like children after finally making it past the door.

“I’m going to ignore the subtext there and say hell yeah anyway!” Zoey cheered as well.

“Any plans on becoming a full-time smith?” Rory asked, winking at Zoey.

“Hah, I’ll break your neck next time you suggest it,” Zoey said with a twinkle in her eye as Rory snorted.

“Yeah, fair.” Rory sighed before half frowning. “So, what do you think are the chances we have one more challenge gate, or is the top of the spire the end?”

“How would I know?” Zoey asked. “This isn’t like any other trial or delve space I’ve been in. Hell, it’s even different than the Deep Chambers.”

Staring at one another, the two sighed before speaking in unison.

“Magic.”

Having said their share, the two begin the final ascent of their climb.

Or they hoped it was the final ascent.

Not even an hour later, Rory spoke up as Zoey jumped.

“Jesus Christ, don’t spook me like that,” Zoey said, grabbing at her chest as if she were having a heart attack.

“What do you mean, spook you?”

“I assumed it would be at least a few months before we next spoke, so I was trying to focus on my mind palace stuff.”

“Oh, uh, sorry?”

“Never mind,” Zoey said as she waved it off. “What is it?”

“So, I was thinking about your return to your people.”

“What about it?”

“Well, the ‘easiest’ route back is going to involve routing through Ehkorrus. So, I was going to see if you wanted to spend a little time exploring the area.”

“Oh?” Zoey raised her eyebrows. “I mean, sure, why not? At this point it's been…. Nearly eight decades for me? They can wait a tad longer. Plus, exploration is sort of my thing. Or it was until I got stranded here for eight decades.”

“Yes, yes, I heard you,” Rory said. “It might be a bit of a shellshock for you, though.”

“Ehh, people are people. What’s a village of a few hundred after all?”

“Right, a few hundred,” Rory chuckled.

Man, I wish I had some way to record her, because that reaction is going to be worth saving.