NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 48: Cycling
Twelve hours later, the group sat around a pot of Nivian’s stew, fatigue etched on their faces.
Fatigue… and success!
After dozens—no, hundreds—of dunks in the pool, the entire party could make it through their trials nine times out of ten. Now, they sat around a small fire, Seena closest by far, and spooned the warm stew into their mouths while talking about cycling and the spheres.
“… and after you’ve got it twisted in a rope like that, you’ve got to get it to pass through the nodes in the right order, while splitting it,” Seeyela explained. “You miss one of those, or go out of order, or don’t pass through the pairs at the same time, and it all falls apart.”
“You listening to that, Yan?” Seena asked, pointing her spoon at the spearman.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it. Twist it, thread it, call it a day. I already got it to work, remember?”
“How many nodes were there?” Wule asked him.
“Uh… fourteen?” Yanily said.
“Sixteen,” Hiral corrected. “Same number as the Meridian Nodes, not including the core,” he added, tapping the center of his chest. “Not a coincidence, I’m guessing.”
“Yeah, Nivian,” Yanily said, turning a glare on the tank.
Nivian, for his part, lifted his head dramatically slowly to look at Yanily. One second of eye contact was all it took before the spearman buried his attention back in his food.
“Man, this stew is good, isn’t it, Odi?” Yanily said to the Lizardman sitting beside him. “Bet you’ve never had anything like it…”
“It’s wonderful… but…” Odi said, looking at the spoon in his hand. “Why is your cutlery so small?”
“Uh… we traded some humans for it,” Wule said. “Yan, don’t you have a real spoon somewhere?”
“Just forks,” Yanily said without missing a beat. “You want a fork?”
“For stew?” Odi asked flatly.
“Didn’t say it’d be easy,” Yanily said, slurping some of the broth from his bowl.
“Yan?” Seena said.
“Yeah, boss?”
“You sure you’re good with the spheres?” she asked seriously.
For once, Yanily didn’t quip back, instead lowering his bowl, though his eyes lingered on the surface.
“The islands, and Favela, need us,” he finally said. “Not just that. Picoli is waiting out there for us too. Trapped in her own body. Every extra second we’re in here is an extra second she’s out there… suffering… with the guilt of what she… she did to Balyo.” He looked up. “There’s too much riding on us for me to screw it up.
“I know about the sixteen nodes. I know where they are and how to get the glowing smoke into them. I’m passing this trial, and I hope you can all keep up.”
Right, sitting opposite Odi beside Yanily, patted the spearman on the back.
“Who is he, and what did he do with Yanily?” Wule asked quietly.
“If you’re all so confident you know what to do with the spheres, don’t you think it’s time to finish your trial?” Odi asked.
“You’ve barely touched your stew,” Hiral pointed out.
“It’s this infernal, useless spoon!” Odi said, thrusting the utensil into the air and staring bloody murder at it. A second of silence, his eyes scrolling between the surprised party members, and then he lowered his hand and coughed gently. “I mean, passing the trial takes priority over my stomach.
“I feel you are ready to succeed where so many others have failed.”
“I thought almost everybody who entered the trials passed eventually?” Nivian said.
“Well, yes, that’s true, but it doesn’t sound nearly as good, does it? I feel you’re ready to succeed where everybody—even our toddlers—have already passed before you?”
“Yeah, not very motivational,” Yanily admitted.
“Should we get some sleep first?” Wule asked.
“Don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could sleep knowing how close we are to passing the trial,” Seeyela said.
“Honestly, me neither,” Wule said. “I’m tired… but also kind of wired, you know? That trial bloodied me pretty badly, so I’m looking forward to putting it in its place.”
“Now’s as good a time as any,” Seena said, putting her empty bowl back on the floor.
“Right and I will clean up while you take care of clearing the trial,” Left said, standing up.
“We will?” Right asked.
“Yes, we will,” Left affirmed.
“Thanks, guys,” Hiral said, doing a quick check of his solar energy capacity to see it comfortably at ninety percent. Cracking his knuckles, he looked at the others. “Ready to do this?”
“Yay, go team almost-as-good-as-toddlers!” Odi cheered. “Rah, rah.”
“Can we throw him in the pool?” Yanily said to Wule. “I think we can.”
“I’m tempted to, but we’ve got people counting on us,” Wule said. “Another time.”
“Yeah, guess so,” Yanily said, and everybody went towards their trials.
“Hiral, Wule, and I have the longest courses,” Seena said. “Give us a bit of a head start, then get to your spheres. Once there, don’t wait. Get cycling. You know what to do after that.”
“Eh… I don’t know what to do after that,” Yanily said. “What do we do?”
“Keep cycling until we succeed,” Nivian said.
“Oh, trick question—not fair,” Yanily said, back to his normal routine. Still, even though the words came out the same, the look in his eyes as he stared at the moving platform above was far more focused than usual.
He’s not kidding about wanting to get back out and save Picoli.
If we can.
A shake of his head banished those thoughts from Hiral’s head. Sure, he could clear his trial ninety-nine times out of a hundred now, but that didn’t mean he could afford to be distracted. Now it was time to make it count.
“Go,” Seena said, and Hiral launched himself forward.
After hours and hours of practice, his body and runes moved without conscious thought. He leapt from one bar to sprint along the next. Rejection and Attraction gave him extra lift or traction, and their usage was second nature to him, just as instinctual as breathing. He flipped through the space between a vertically rotating windmill, then kicked off a beam swinging by on the other side to catch a higher bar.
A pull, a dash, a forty-foot leapfrog course, and just like that, he was halfway through the trial. He paused there, watching the rotations change slightly—just like they always did—then waited for the pattern he needed.
There!
He hurled himself forward, springing from bar to bar without needing to look, trusting in his Dex and Atn to make the small adjustments needed. Eyes constantly moving, predicting his path, Hiral was back at the final wall within thirty seconds. Without hesitation he charged ahead, activating his runes one after the other.
Time Contraction, Time Dilation, Gravity, Attraction, Rejection—he spun solar energy into each of them and passed through the narrow tunnel in a single straight shot. Another application of his runes pulled him down to the platform, and he skidded to a stop, this time perfectly beside the sphere.
Letting go of his magic, Hiral breathed out calmly, and the yellow double-helix pattern etched across his body flared and faded a moment later.
What was that?
He quickly checked his status window for a debuff, but his eyes settled on his base stats.
Attributes
Strength (Str)—18 (0) = 18
Endurance (End)—18 (0) = 18
Dexterity (Dex)—20 (40) = 68
Intelligence (Int)—18 (0) = 18
Wisdom (Wis)—18 (0) = 18
Attunement (Atn)—20 (40) = 68
That was it—his base Atn had gone up by a point from his practice in the trials! With his PIM and the twenty percent bonus, that gave him almost 70 in both his Dex and Atn. Oh, nice! And that’s not even including the Lost ring I don’t have on right now.
But the pull on his solar energy reminded him he didn’t have the time to celebrate at that moment. Pivoting on his heel, Hiral put both hands on the sphere beside him and instantly found himself back in that dark pit, the cloud of smoke above him.
Too bad the smoke resets itself every time I leave here.
Still, out of everybody, he’d had the most practice in this strange cycling space since he’d cleared the trial the earliest—and had the most solar energy. With familiar ease, Hiral reached his senses up to the cloud hanging above him and deftly wound the lose threads of solar energy into a tight rope.
That starting point was like the central Meridian Node in the middle of his chest, where his Rune of Separation now lay, but also where he’d had the crystal embedded under his skin as a child. From chatting with the Growers, it was also where they’d had the seeds planted that grew to be the root system stretching throughout their bodies. It made sense that would be where the cycling process would start.
Once that was mostly done—only a small part of his attention was needed to keep doing it now that the process was started—he began pushing the rope towards the necessary nodes. And to do that, he’d need to split the rope he went to so much trouble binding together.
The first split was, in a way, the easiest, taking the rope he’d tightly wound and unraveling it into two equally strong, yet smaller, ropes. The first split he sent up higher into the darkness, but he then had to split it again almost immediately, sending two more lines of rope out to the left and right. These, he believed, reached for the Meridian Nodes on the shoulders. As soon as the ropes of smoke snaked through the paths to the nodes, they sort of clicked into place, feeding energy to the nodes. Like the process to twist the rope, it took a small amount of concentration to keep them tethered there, but Hiral turned his focus to the next step.
There would be another split from the shoulders, but first he continued threading the rope through the nodes and around in a circle to meet again opposite where they’d earlier split. As soon as they reached each other—around the nape of a person’s neck—Hiral bound them together again, then pushed them up to what would be the Meridian Node in the head. A soft click in his mind tethered the solar energy there, and he retraced his senses back along the curving lines extending from the shoulders.
Around where the shoulder blades would be, Hiral found the paths that would trace down the Meridian Lines on a person’s back. This next part was, in a way, the most difficult. The more nodes he had going at one time, the more concentration it took to maintain them. The best way he’d found to deal with that was to push through as many as he could at one time, kind of like opening several drains in a sink to let the water out.
So, with that image in mind, Hiral split off new ropes of solar energy for the two paths between the shoulders and the nape of the neck—and the shoulders themselves—then pushed all four ropes straight down.
Nodes lit up in quick succession, both sides around the middle of the back, along with the elbows and hands, and just like that, Hiral was over halfway done. With nine nodes glowing, it was taking a fair amount of concentration to keep them stable, the pressure of it like a soft headache in the back of his skull, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as the first few times he’d tried. Each session he’d spent in this strange pocket world had made the manipulation of the solar energy easier and easier. He took a calming breath, then moved on to the next step.
Maintaining the ropes in the current nodes, Hiral went back to his starting point: the spot that represented the central Meridian Node. Taking the second split he’d left hanging there, he dragged the top down through the path directly to where he now stood. This node seemed to represent the one found in a person’s stomach. It played an important role in maintaining the overall flow of energy, and as soon as he anchored the rope there, he felt the strain of holding the other nine nodes ease slightly.
Slightly, but not enough to risk losing his concentration, and Hiral continued pulling the rope of solar energy down, then split it again and pushed it out to the sides. Two more nodes quickly lit up, representing the ones found on a person’s hips. That just left four more, and normally they’d be the most difficult.
At this point, the ropes of solar energy he was working with were barely more than threads, weaker and fraying at the edges. Thankfully, the last four nodes he needed to connect to were in straight lines and didn’t require any more splits. Like he’d done up with the shoulders, Hiral visualized opening a drain, and the solar energy practically tumbled down through the legs to light up the nodes at the knees and feet.
As soon as the final nodes at the bottom connected, the whole structure around Hiral glowed brighter. Solar energy pulsed around him in time with his own beating heart, and the pressure in the back of his head eased to almost nothing. It was like the solar energy wanted to be connected like that. Like it was the most natural thing in the world.
And it just felt right.
How did I never notice this was missing before?
But that was a question for later. Even though the pressure had lessened in his skull, he couldn’t lose his grip on the connection. It felt right, yes, but it still required direction. Focus. And his own solar energy was still quickly dropping in this pocket-space.
Another minute of concentration and he stabilized the whole structure, bringing it to the equilibrium he and the others guessed was necessary to pass the trial.
How long will it take the others to…?
Pop. The black pocket-space vanished in the blink of an eye, and Hiral once again found himself standing on the platform at the end of the trial.
“What the…?” he started to ask before he noticed the sphere wasn’t between his hands any longer. Then he felt a grinding sensation under his feet. The platform was moving. And it wasn’t just his, he realized as he looked around.
Five more platforms—each with their own smiling Grower—glided towards the central bridge where Odi, Left, and Right stood waiting.
“Congratulations,” Odi said before gesturing towards the far end of the bridge, where the next massive doorway now stood open.