I am going to tell you how many tis I died, and then I am going to tell you that the number does not matter, and both of those things are true.
The number, for the record, was sowhere past two hundred. I stopped being able to hold it cleanly after the first forty or so, when the deaths stopped being events and beca a texture... the way rain stops being individual drops once it is heavy enough.
Porridge... Storm... Gold... Dark... Engine... Porridge...Death... Death... Death... Death...
I lived these sentences more tis than I have lived any other sentence in my life, including the one about wanting to be a mage, including the one about my mother loving , and I want you to understand I am not being dramatic when I say it beca the realest thing I knew.
But here is why the number does not matter.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 3% liquid ]
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 5% liquid ]
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 9% liquid ]
It was working.
∞
I figured out the rule the way I figure out everything... by dying enough tis to see the pattern under it.
I could not repeat how many tis I woke up to my sister’s voice, "Up, up, lazy cur. Elric, I say, wake up!"
Then hear the cries of alarm from the camp as a storm that covered the heavens descended, and in a few seconds, the golden lightning would fall and erase .
Waking up again with the ache of dying fresh in my mind, and the lightning descending in the next mont.
I soon realized that this lightning was not following across the loop, else its fury would have been spent by now; instead, like , it was being refreshed, as anyti the world or whatever was running the laws of creation detected I was about to beco an Adept with Creation Lightning, it strikes down.
It took longer than I was willing to admit that the fusion advanced when I endured. Not when I died; dying reset the damage and gave back my body and banked whatever I’d earned. But the earning happened when I refused to allow my body and soul to be torn apart by the Tribulation lightning; this act of defiance compressed my soul under the wrath from the heavens.
Every second I kept Mortal Shell clamped over a soul the gold lightning was taking apart, every second I refused to let go while the bolts unmade , board by board, the liquid in my Anima grew by so fraction the screen could not be bothered to show in real ti.
So the math was ugly and simple. Die fast, advance slow. Endure the full unmaking, every bolt, the arm, the jaw, the leisurely disassembly of everything I was while a sky that found wanting took its ti, advanced my ascension faster.
I want to be honest here. The first dozen tis I understood that I needed to hold, I still chose fast. I would get out of the cot, walk out of my tent, and see the storm descend over the camp, and I could not make myself stand there and be slowly unmade again, so I would let Mortal Shell go and take the bolt to the skull and get the rciful version.
Three percent... Five... The coward’s pace. I am not ashad of it. There is a kind of courage that is just being too tired to run, and I had not reached it yet.
Then I reached it.
Sowhere in there, I could not tell you which death, since they were all beginning to blur, I stood up out of the cot, looked at the sky, and did not let go of Mortal Shell.
I walked out into the dawn, and I let the first bolt take my arm, and I stayed standing. I let the second take my leg, and I stayed conscious. I let the sky disassemble at its leisure, and I held on through every second of it, and I did the worst arithtic a person can do, which is to choose the longer pain because the longer pain is the one that gets you ho.
There were screams all around , most especially from Bari and Dara; they did not understand what was happening, nor why I could stand when my body was being torn apart by lightning... Maybe it was a good thing that everything went back the way it was, because in so of the tis I had died, I was cursing the heavens.
[ Creation-Anima, Tier Three: Fusing — 14% liquid ]
That death bought four percent.
∞
The lightning taught , too. That is the part I did not expect; however, it was a testant to how much I was suffering that it took so long to grab hold of this obvious truth in the midst of my tribulation.
I am lightning, folks. I have been becoming lightning for seventeen loops and however many deaths, and it turns out that when a sky spends two hundred deaths striking you with the stuff, you learn its grammar whether you want to or not.
The tribulation’s gold was not like mine; it was heavier, and what I would describe as more certain, the difference between a knife and a verdict. This lightning understood its purpose better than I understood my life at this point, and this was the first ti I had ever considered the elents as aware, and I should see lightning more than just bolts of electrified plasma.
But at the end of the day, it was still lightning, and lightning has rules, and I have spent my whole death-soaked existence learning the rules of lightning, all the way from Spark.
By the hundredth death, I knew the bolt before it fell. By the hundred-and-fiftieth, I could feel where it would strike a half-second early, the way you feel a sneeze coming.
And sowhere past that, lying in the ash with no face and no leg and my soul rising off like silver smoke, I stopped bracing against the bolts.
I started listening to them.
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