"Why you asked?" Darian smiled and said. "There is no particular reason behind it. When I ascended the combat tower in my ti, I could not get particularly far. I reached a point where the floors ahead of were beyond what I could manage, and when I was asked whether I would be willing to leave behind a soul fragnt to be used as a warrior for future contestants, I agreed. It seed simple enough at the ti. If I could not go far in this tower myself, then I decided that I could at least make sure others would have a difficult ti going far either. That was the entirety of my reasoning."
Max nodded calmy but inwardly he was sneering at Darian.
The reasoning Darian had offered was not rely unconvincing. It was, when examined against the reality of what giving up a soul fragnt actually ant, so structurally flawed that Max found it difficult to understand how anyone could expect it to hold together under the weight of basic scrutiny.
A soul was not a resource that a cultivator could draw on and replenish without consequence. It was the most fundantal thing a person possessed, the core from which everything else in cultivation extended, and separating even a fragnt of it from the whole was not a minor inconvenience that the remaining soul recovered from quickly with a little rest and effort.
It was a wound of a particular and serious kind, one that demanded sustained and painstaking work to heal, that could set a cultivator back across years of progress, and that left traces in the soul's composition long after the outward damage had been addressed.
Every cultivator who understood anything real about the nature of the soul understood this, and anyone who had advanced far enough in their cultivation to be considered for the role of a preserved warrior within the combat tower would have understood it better than most.
The idea that a person who possessed that understanding would voluntarily submit to the removal of a soul fragnt because they had failed to climb as high as they wanted in a tower and had therefore decided, out of so petty and formless resentnt, that they would make the ascent harder for the cultivators who ca after them, was not a motivation.
It was a story assembled from parts that did not fit together, dressed in the language of casualness to disguise the fact that none of the underlying logic survived contact with reality.
Nobody made that trade for that reason. The cost was too specific, too personal, and too lasting to be paid in exchange for sothing as insubstantial as the satisfaction of watching strangers fail at sothing you had also failed at.
"Enough of this," Darian said smiling. "Let us fight."
The aura that rolled off him as he spoke was no longer the asured, contained thing it had been during their exchange. It pressed outward at its full height, the fifth level of the Rebirth Realm announcing itself with a pressure that filled the chamber from floor to ceiling.
"Co on then," Max said clenching his fist.
Darian's smile widened, stretching into sothing that carried an edge of genuine pleasure in it, the expression of soone who had been waiting for permission to begin and was now entirely glad to have it. He took one step forward, a single step, deliberate and unhurried, and then everything changed.
Another Darian appeared beside the first one. Then another materialized at a different position, and another beyond that, and another still, each one wearing the sa robes and the sa expression and the sa smile stretched wide across the sa face, until Max stood at the center of a formation of figures that numbered in the tens.
Every one of them identical to the original, every one of them looking at him with that sa expression of bright and slightly unhinged delight, their laughter rising from all directions simultaneously and layering over itself into sothing that filled the chamber with a sound that was deeply unsettling in the way that things were unsettling when they were familiar and wrong at the sa ti.
The disciples watching the broadcast outside the tower reacted imdiately, their voices rising in a overlapping wave of competing assessnts as they tried to categorize what they were seeing on the screens above them.
"Is that a projection technique? So kind of illusion-based ability?"
"I think it is a cloning technique. He has genuinely split himself into multiple bodies."
"They cannot all be real. Only one of them is the original. The rest must be constructs of so kind."
The crowd continued in this vein, each voice adding its own interpretation to the noise, until Elder Seraphina spoke. "What you are seeing on that screen is not a projection technique," she said. "It is not an illusion, and it is not a cloning ability. What Darian is doing is called a Speed Mirage. He is moving with such extraordinary velocity that he is capable of occupying many different positions within the sa span of ti, and the afterimages his movent leaves behind are so complete and so sustained that they are visually indistinguishable from the original body. Every one of those figures you see surrounding Max is a position Darian has already vacated, preserved in the air by the sheer speed of his transit between them, and the original is sowhere among them moving too fast for the eye to separate him from his own trail."
She paused, and sothing in her expression shifted toward genuine curiosity as she added, "I wonder how Max will respond to this. As far as I recall, Max does not possess speed of this caliber."
The disciples who had been offering their own theories absorbed this in silence for a mont, and then the understanding moved through the crowd in a visible wave, faces changing as the reality of what Max was facing settled into place.
The thirtieth floor had a reputation as one of the natural stopping points for disciples ascending the combat tower, a floor where ascents that had been proceeding smoothly encountered sothing they were not equipped to handle, and the Speed Mirage was precisely the kind of technique that explained that reputation.
Against it, the conventional responses available to a cultivator were severely limited, and the ones that remained required either a speed that could match or exceed what Darian was producing, or a level of raw power sufficient to make precision irrelevant by simply overwhelming every position at once.
"Let us see how Max gets past this one," Joe said, and his smile had returned with the satisfied quality of soone watching events move toward the conclusion they had predicted from the beginning. "If this were any other disciple, even one at the ninth or tenth level of the Rebirth Realm, they might have the option of simply overpowering their opponent in a situation like this, using the gap in cultivation to compensate for the gap in information. But Max is at the third level of the Rebirth Realm."
He let that number sit in the air for a mont before continuing. "The cultivation difference between him and Darian is already significant enough that brute force is not a straightforward answer even under normal circumstances, and these are not normal circumstances. Identifying the real body among that many Speed Mirage afterimages while simultaneously managing the pressure of a fifth level Rebirth Realm aura at close range is not sothing a third level cultivator can reasonably be expected to accomplish. This, I would say, is where the ascent ends."
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