Noah drifted in absolute darkness, suspended in a void so complete that concepts like up and down lost all aning. Sensations had beco irrelevant. He simply existed in the space between thoughts, consciousness reduced to its most basic elent and cast adrift in an ocean of nothingness.
Ti had no aning here. He might have been floating for monts or centuries. The darkness was patient, content to let him dissolve gradually rather than forcing the process. His sense of individual identity began to fray at the edges like old rope coming apart fiber by fiber.
Then, impossibly, there was light.
A single pinpoint of illumination in the endless dark, so small and distant that it could easily have been mistaken for imagination. But it grew steadily, pulsing with the rhythm of his heartbeat. Each pulse drew him increntally back toward consciousness, back toward the awareness of having a body, of being soone specific rather than just another fragnt of dissolving thought in the cosmic void.
The light continued to expand until it encompassed his entire field of vision.
And then, Noah opened his eyes.
He stood in a field of grass so brilliantly green it almost hurt to look at it directly. The blades swayed in a breeze that carried the scent of wildflowers and fresh earth, though he couldn't feel the wind against his skin. Above him stretched a sky of perfect, cloudless blue, the kind of flawless azure that existed only in children's drawings and impossible dreams.
A picnic blanket had been spread beneath the shade of a solitary oak tree, its red and white checkered pattern bright against the erald grass. Food containers and dishes were arranged with careful precision around a wicker basket. The whole scene radiated warmth and contentnt.
Two figures sat beside the basket with their backs turned toward him. A man and a woman in comfortable, casual clothing. Sothing deep in Noah's chest twisted with recognition so powerful it was almost painful.
He knew these people, he realized with sudden clarity. So part of him told him that with certainty.
He took a step closer to the two people, desperate to see their faces clearly. But the closer he approached, the more their features seed to blur and shift, as if soone had taken an eraser to a photograph and carefully removed every distinguishing characteristic.
A voice bud in his throat, a word he hadn’t last spoken in a few years now.
“Mom?” he called out. The woman didn't turn or acknowledge his presence in any way.
He looked at the man instead, the figure he’d resented for so long in his life. He opened his mouth to speak the man’s na, but no words ca to him. What was his father even called? Noah couldn’t rember.
The two continued their conversation in voices too low for him to make out individual words, gesturing occasionally toward the food or pointing at sothing in the distance that existed only in their shared experience.
And then, another figure appeared in his peripheral vision. A child, around eight or nine years old, running through the grass with a wooden stick clutched in one small hand, chasing after sothing invisible with the boundless energy that only children could have. The boy's laughter rang out clear and bright.
That was him, he realized. A version of himself from so long ago that it felt like looking at a different person entirely. And yet, still familiar sohow. He had always been a rumbustious child.
Noah’s eyes suddenly caught sothing, a full-length mirror standing perfectly upright in the open field in the middle of nowhere. Curious, he walked towards the mirror, and his younger self followed as well. The boy overtook him, rushing to the mirror before they both slowed down as Noah stood right behind the child.
Noah approached the mirror alongside his younger self, stepping up to stand just behind the boy's shoulder. Behind him, his parents had also appeared in the mirror's surface, their outlines clear and familiar, but their faces remained frustratingly obscured.
In the middle was him. His hair was white, his body carefully shaped to inhuman perfection. His eyes were red draconic slits, and his features had turned more angular. At a will, he could transform any of his limbs into monstrous claws or sprout wings should he wish. Here, in this mont, he looked the very image of an inhuman monster.
The two images blurred in the mirror, reality distorting as Noah beca one with the child. He stood now, as a young boy, his eyes shining a deep crimson red.
As he stared in horror at the reflected crimson gaze, the peaceful field began to dissolve around the edges. The field faded to gray, the brilliant sky darkened, and the warm golden light that had suffused everything started to drain away, leading to an ominous crimson hue.
When he turned away from the mirror, the picnic scene had vanished completely. The tree, the blanket, the two faceless adults, all gone, as if it had never existed in the first place.
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The world around him decayed, eventually turning into a vast expanse of featureless black that stretched to infinity in every direction.
Noah turned back around, to look at the mirror behind him. Instead, he found a door. It stood completely alone in the emptiness, detached from anything else that may have existed.
Noah reached out, his hand hovered above the handle, fingers barely brushing the cool tal. The brass seed to pulse beneath his touch like sothing alive, responding to his presence with its own mysterious awareness.
He twisted the handle, hearing a click as the door slid op—
He felt the presence of a thin hand grabbing his wrist, a single word echoing in his mind. Don’t.
The single word carried absolute authority despite being spoken as barely more than a whisper. It was unmistakably feminine, unmistakably familiar, though it took Noah a mont to place the voice.
He turned, ready to see the goddess who seed so inadvertently tied to his fate, and found only darkness behind him. But the sensation of her presence remained on his hand, and as Noah looked down, he felt sothing burning within him, carried by a golden mark that had been seared into his soul during their brief but life-changing encounter.
The blessing burned like a miniature sun behind his sternum, its light driving back the oppressive darkness of this strange realm.
"Not yet," ca one last whisper. He could tell she wanted to say more… but the light began to fade, the warmth slipping away.
Noah's hand fell away from the door as if the tal had suddenly beco red-hot. As he stepped back, the door changed subtly. The wood that had looked pristine revealed itself to be rotting, the golden handle now lined with skulls and teeth, as an eye lounged at the center watching over it all. He saw the thing for what it was now, a trap.
Noah looked around himself, at the endless void and the gate, and realized sothing. “I’m dreaming, aren’t I?”
Just by speaking the words, he knew them to be true. He’d been in enough spirit trials by now to start to pick up on them sowhat. But unlike the other trials… he did not understand what he was supposed to do to complete this one. And he didn’t have Tony to wake him up either, which ant he would have to do things the hard way.
Noah reached out to his abilities and found them responsive, as if his connection to the system itself had been severed. He closed his eyes and reached deep into his ntal inventory, visualizing the familiar interface, the organized rows of items and equipnt that he'd morized through countless hours of use. From that imagined vault, he began to visualize just one thing. A dagger.
The weapon materialized, slowly at first, before eventually coalescing into a fixed shape. Noah reached out, pulling it out of his imagined inventory and felt the object’s weight settle into his hands. It had a smooth leather-wrapped hilt that fit perfectly in his grip, and a single-edged blade that glead with sharp purpose.
Noah opened his eyes and looked down at his leg. ntally he turned off pain tolerance in his mind. Realistically, a simple wound like this would not even register to him as anything too damaging anymore with his constitution being as high as it was. But sohow, he had a feeling that it would work here.
He also had a feeling that it’d hurt a lot more than it would in reality.
Without allowing himself ti to reconsider or hesitate, he drove the dagger deep into the at of his thigh.
The pain that exploded through his nervous system was anything but imaginary.
White-hot agony lanced up his leg and throughout his entire body. The void around him began to crack like glass under extre pressure, hairline fractures spreading outward from where he stood in an ever-expanding web of destruction. The door, the endless expanse, the lingering echoes of whispered temptations, all of it shattered and fell away like fragnts of a broken mirror, each piece dissolving into nothingness before it could hit the ground.
Noah gasped and lurched upright, as consciousness returned to his body with a sudden shift. Sweat covered his body, as he panted, feeling his heart racing, a pulse of pain travelling from his leg. He looked down to see a dagger shaped wound exactly where he’d stabbed himself, slowly starting to close itself up.
Pulling himself up, Noah regarded the pedestal. It stood exactly where he'd first encountered it, unchanged and unmoving. The tallic sphere continued its gentle rotation above the stone platform, glowing with the sa soft phosphorescence as the mist that filled the cavern. Whatever transformation it had undergone during his hallucinatory experience had actually happened in the physical world.
Noah wrapped his hand around the trial object and carefully channeled a small amount of mana into its surface, half-expecting another round of psychic assault.
This ti, however, nothing dramatic occurred. No transformation, no malevolent response, no whispers from vast entities lurking in the spaces between dinsions. The object remained completely inert, revealing itself to be nothing more than what it appeared to be, a simple tallic sphere designed to be carried and retrieved.
"Thank god," he muttered under his breath, a mixture of relief and exasperation coloring his voice.
Noah pushed himself with a grunt of effort, wiping his bloody hand clean on his trousers. The trial object felt warm and solid in his grip, the cool tal soothing to the touch. He took one final look around the cavern, noting that the oppressive atmosphere had lifted considerably. The mist still swirled through the space, but it no longer carried that sense of malevolent intelligence. The Watcher’s presence that had pressed against his consciousness was gone, leaving behind only ordinary stone and vapor.
Noah began walking toward the exit, his wounded leg ached enough that he turned on pain tolerance again. He could feel his constitution struggling a bit to heal the wound, a sense of confusion at where and how it’d appeared here, and if this had simply always been how the place had been, but though slow, the injury was healing and so he didn’t mind it too much.
The exit grew larger as he approached, revealing itself to be a simple archway carved into the stone, the other side of it a glowing white nothingness. As he approached, the object in his hand lit up with light, and enchanted runes slid across the gates, flickering.
Noah could sense complex magic changing the location he would arrive in, due to the presence of the object in his hand, and smiled.
The trial object pulsed one last ti with warm light in his hand, as if acknowledging his success, then settled back into quiescent dormancy.
Noah smiled and walked through the gate, disappearing in a flash of light.
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