"Let me see, high-risk and congested, high-risk and congested..." The Seeker Scribe in charge of handling Sentinel assignments browsed through a thick case of hundreds upon hundreds of patrol areas until he found one that seemed to fit my requirements.
"There you go." He put the assignment order on top of the desk. "Eight floor, residential area bordering the rift complex. Daily cases of corruption. If it wasn't so congested, the Faith would probably deploy a weekly patrol to make a clean sweep instead of keeping it monthly."
"I'll take it," I directly agreed after skimming through the patrol file.
It was exactly the sort of area that suited my [Exertion] needs.
Once the paperwork was taken care of, I passed by the Sentinel armory to change into my Sentinel set, took great care in ascertaining the sharpness of my four needle swords and the integrity of my metal-thread fabric armor...
Then I took off, zipping through corridors until I found the closest exit and flying off into the dangerous outside world as a lone fairy.
From this point onwards, there was no holding back anymore.
My [Cycle] exploded outward, pulling in everything without distinction, and I let [Guided] take over the process of deciding what to keep and what to expel.
I tuned my entire [Perception] to seek any manner of abnormalities, my heightened [Focus] directed towards readying myself for a net being thrown at me out of nowhere.
I made every beat of my wings soundless, my balance ready to tilt fluidly in any direction, my body prepared to wildly contort itself.
Only in such a primed state did I and [Guided] finally feel adequately prepared for the long flight ahead.
I flew over entire streets, cutting through entire floors where the city allowed me to do so, skipped jammed staircases by brushing the ceiling and never touching the steps themselves...
Hardly a quarter of a day had passed before I entered the airspace belonging to the fifth floor, where my patrol area awaited, closer to the rift.
As for what I was expected to do there...
Well, pretty much everything.
Collect intelligence as to the state of the infrastructure, the quality of life, any local anomalies, which factions claimed which building...
I was also authorized to heal the downtrodden, preach the Faith, receive donations, and dispense my knowledge of Aspects without barrier...
The Faith Of The Aspects was like that.
Wherever it opened a branch, the duty of spreading knowledge where society failed to propagate it efficiently, and to those who needed it fell upon its members.
And if a member of the Faith could both do that while elevating the status of the Faith in the hearts of those who felt abandoned by Civilization, it was even better.
That it also provided real development opportunities for Sentinels and further entwined the interests of the factions that didn't want to bother themselves with patrol duties was only a convenient side effect.
Or so my fellow Faith members told me to say if I was ever asked about why the Faith expended so much manpower towards ensuring that at least one patrol of the Faith was realized monthly everywhere throughout the city.
Before long, I finally attained the area I was meant to patrol.
As expected, it was massively crowded, the streets were narrow, every building was tightly packed together, and everywhere I turned my [Perception] towards, it was a boisterous mess no sane mind could make sense of.
Clearly, this area hadn't been unjustly given its reputation as the place where all those who abhorred foolish hopes of getting rich through exploring the Red Sand Realm gathered, only to later turn up empty-handed with nothing but their lives.
Honestly, though, with such a massive population, I wouldn't be surprised if I were told that most of those who stepped into the Red Sand Realm with hopes of a better future never returned, their existence forever buried in the sands of another Realm.
Not that I cared.
I was here to-
My [Perception] suddenly caught onto a series of cries of distress that broke even through the surrounding deafening clamor.
I launched myself in their direction.
It wasn't about heroism or selflessness, as I had grown increasingly disillusioned about such concepts the more I learned of the inner workings of Civilization, it was about me.
My Essence development.
My Path.
Four streets over, I caught sight of the location where the cries originated from, and there I witnessed a single giant with eyes shining the same red light as the Red Sand Rift, butchering people with wild swings of its massive axe.
Already, a dozen people had had their bodies ripped apart, including what I believed to be children, painting the dirty floor with blood of all hues of red.
This was, as detailed in the patrol file, an evident case of Essence corruption.
It was, even more evidently, a case of Pyrrenox corruption, with the inflicted Essence Entity going berserk while their organs overheated and ruptured in exchange for a short period of exponentially increased physical power.
If it had happened to a member of the Faith, that person would have been restrained at all costs and given the miraculous one in a million chance to fight off and purify the corruption festering within its Essence while receiving the care of healers, but out here?
The chances of successfully restraining someone actively succumbing to Pyrrenox corruption without a full Sentinel squad were so low as to be negligible.
A quick death was all the mercy I could provide on my own.
I let myself be sublimated by [Guided], [Focus]ing only on elevating my mind and body to their apex state.
Without needing to think about it, I embraced the [Darkness] brought by standing unseen above everything and unsheathed one of my needle swords.
"Gaaaah!"
"Ah!"
"Someone help me! Please!"
"No! No! Get away! Don't come near me!"
"Run away! I'll hold him back!"
Providentially, before I had the time to initiate my first dive, someone was foolish enough to stand up to the rampaging giant.
I readied myself.
The moment the brave giant initiated its suicidal charge against the corrupted shadow of what was once a life filled with potential, I visualized his approach and let myself be [Guided] to begin my dive.
With one agile twist of my wings and body, I maneuvered myself to be aligned with the brave giant, who had already been noticed by the frenzied husk of flesh that had, in turn, launched itself towards him in a wild rush that promised naught but misery for anyone who dared to put themselves in its way.
I knew what was bound to happen once the two collided.
Still, I felt no pity or sadness, only cold pragmatism.
Whether it cost a life or not, it was an opportunity all the same.
The [Will] to see a life ended by my own hands erupted forth, the intense warmth devouring my entire body.
From my muscles to my bones, to my skin, to my organs, to my brain, to my wings, every part of my body, which I couldn't have been more intimately familiar with, was reinforced to its absolute limits.
Then the warmth extended beyond the confines of my physical vessel, covering my needle sword and bending the air ahead of me such that it opened a path towards my target.
"Graaah!"
"Die!"
A flimsy sword and a massive axe met.
The brave giant was summarily sent crashing against the metallic wall of a building, my [Perception] catching onto worrying sounds left in the wake of the axe's passage.
A wake that left the corrupted giant's face fully open.
A corrupted giant that only then realized its wild guard had been bypassed.
My needle sword penetrated straight through the giant's left eye, and I [Will]ed for all my residual momentum to perfectly transmit towards the tip.
The next second, a burst of force nearly caused me to lose grasp on my needle sword, but I unremittingly held onto it, mushing whatever brain matter was still left intact inside the thick skull of this corrupted shell.
Then I took off upwards with hurried beats of my wings, ascending back to safety, leaving my needle sword behind.
By the time I turned around, the giant had yet to roar like a wild beast again, and when I let a second pass, the reason became clear.
It had stopped moving, its body frozen in a posture that hinted at one of its hands reaching for its face.
Another ten seconds later, as if time had finally caught up with what had transpired, the giant at last collapsed, crashing against the ground with the muted thud of inanimate flesh.
Oddly, the only thought that passed through my mind as I beheld the reaping of my first sapient life was...
This was so much simpler compared to killing rust abominations.
My [Focus] then moved on to dealing with the bloody aftermath left in the wake of this corruption.
I first descended towards where the brave giant had been sent crashing, and somewhere in my mind, as I witnessed the gruesome sight of his left arm quasi ripped from the shoulder it ought to be attached to, with blood pouring in a steady flow that promised swift death through blood loss...
I looked back at my past self.
A few months-old fairy who had to trudge through a sea of rotting cadavers as she was seemingly left as the last living being in a devastated settlement that had until then been her entire world.
How things had changed.
I reached for the brave giant's ripped left arm and stuck it back where it belonged before [Will]ing for the blood vessels to knit themselves back together according to what [Guided] was the right anatomy for... an Uras with a single pair of arms.
Once the brave giant's vitals were stabilized, I moved on to see whether there were more survivors in need of a fairy herself in need of performing some healing [Exertion]s.
After that, I surmised it would be a perfect time to carry out some social [Exertion]s by spreading the gospel of the Aspects.
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
One minor fluctuation in my Essence was all it took for my already defective [Cycle] to collapse, once again leaving me to commune with my Essence that was going through the pulsing turmoil of roiling shifts accompanying one of my Aspects advancing to Tier 2.
As it was the fourth time I went through such an Aspect advancement, however, it wasn't so much the unique Essence disorder itself that interested me, it was...
Everything else.
Me.
My Aspects.
My Path.
Weirdly, my [Cycle] Aspect advancing to Tier 2 felt like I was crossing a threshold to my Essence development that I hadn't expected to cross so early, despite having gone through all the slow and meticulous anti-overdevelopment [Exertion]s to make it happen.
But while this advancement would negate another month's worth of anti-overdevelopment [Exertion] routine recovery time from my stubborn early Essence overdevelopment disorder, I didn't care so much about that anymore.
Because early Essence overdevelopment disorder or not, I was still inexorably developing my Essence.
I was even doing so by [Focus]ing nearly exclusively on the most annoying, difficult, and time and energy-consuming [Exertion]s I could.
And the longer I kept doing so, the more developed my Essence would become, which would only allow me to heighten my future Essence development pace further, until I unavoidably escaped the Essence development intensity I was presently bound by.
Or maybe my Essence would simply continue to be on the edge of entering a potentially lethal state of overdevelopment for the next decades.
One way or another, it all came down to my Path.
My own body and all the biological processes that governed it held no more major or shocking secrets that my countless hours spent reading and my thousands of [Tempering] experiments and [Will] manifestations touching on all parts of my body hadn't already unveiled.
That meant once I achieved embryonic breathing—which would only become easier after my [Cycle] Aspect advanced to Tier 2—I would have fulfilled the last requirement needed to reach the [Cultivation] Aspect's minimal synthesis threshold.
Just like that, I would be simultaneously working on four Aspect synthesis, three single Aspect synthesis, and one three-Aspects synthesis.
[Guided] (Origin)[Exertion] (Tier 2)[Cycle] (Tier 1)[Insight] (Tier 2)[Perception] (Tier 1)[Tempering] (Tier 1)[Darkness] (Tier 1)[Will] (Tier 2)[Focus] (Tier 0)
Maybe it was a bit much, maybe it was a perfect amount, maybe I should add synthesizing my [Focus] Aspect into [Clarity] on top of that, regardless of it still being Tier 0, maybe...
Maybe it was time I seriously started contemplating migrating out of the Red Sand Sector, if only as a thought exercise.
Long gone, though not forgotten, were the days when I apprehensively contemplated what awaited me the next time I woke up.
Now, the timescale I lived by was one that existed on a magnitude of months, years, decades, and instead of seeking to hide my very existence from everything, my first thought every time I woke up went to what I could possibly learn today while developing my Essence.
Hence, communing with my Essence, feeling my Path...
It felt like nothing.
Or maybe like a perfectly aligned mirror.
Everything was as I wished they were.
All my Aspects served a purpose.
My Essence kept on developing in every direction simultaneously.
Aspect Advanced: [Cycle] (Tier 1) ➞ [Cycle] (Tier 2)
And when the turmoil of my Essence's advancement disorder faded, and I reestablished my [Cycle], it truly was just that.
An expanded pulling area.
An easier expelling.
A more efficient [Cycle]ing.
Possibly, by creating an artificial environment filled with nutrition inside a sealed room, I could hope to have a slow [Will] manifestation [Exertion] session.
If not...
It didn't really matter either way.
My [Will] Aspect felt ideal enough as it was, after all.
If there was one fundamental Aspect I believed was worth the struggle of advancing through many Tiers despite the exponential relative difficulty of doing so, it was it.
Ending my Essence communion, the infinite complexity of all that made up my Path faded away, returning me to a dull and oppressive reality one had to struggle against at all times if they really wanted to get anywhere.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
If I had known how thorough an Aspect study had to be, involving much more than mere subjective observations of what the concerned Aspect's impact on my Path had been, I would have adopted a different approach than the one I set out on using.
Not that my initial approach of exhaustively listing all the minor differences the formation of the Tier 0 [Focus] Aspect brought to my [Exertion] routine and life in general had been wrong.
It was simply, according to Archivist Clovia, to whom I handed the draft of my [Focus] Aspect study to review, "hard to relate to".
So, not wrong.
Just... "inappropriate for the common Seekers".
If the writing, review, and publication of an Aspect study hadn't been one of the requirements to be promoted from Acolyte to Scribe, I would have been indifferent to whether others could understand my Path...
Then, as if just to complicate everything, mere days before I finished redacting the common Seeker-friendlier version of my [Focus] Aspect study, my [Focus] Aspect decided it was the perfect time to initiate its advancement to Tier 1.
And from my own big mouth to the chatty mouths of my friends and acquaintances, that news eventually made its way to Archivist Clovia's ears, who told me in no uncertain terms that adding my perspective on this advancement to my [Focus] Aspect study would make a marvelous addition.
My big mouth be damned.
Consequently, for the second time in what was initially meant to be a basic write-it-hand-it process, I found myself amending my study to add a new section.
As for what to fill this new section with...
I looked back at the core content of my [Focus] Aspect study.
[Focus] sharpens attention, narrowing awareness onto a chosen target.[Focus] filters distractions, reducing sensitivity to irrelevant stimuli.[Focus] enhances precision, refining actions and minimizing errors.[Focus] sustains attention over time, delaying mental fatigue.[Focus] improves memory, strengthening both retention and recall.[Focus] refines pattern recognition and anticipation.[Focus] stabilizes emotions, reducing impulsive interference.[Focus] improves timing and coordination between perception and action.[Focus] reduces cognitive noise, quieting stray thoughts.[Focus] increases efficiency, minimizing wasted effort and energy...
An exhaustive list of everything the [Focus] Aspect brought to my Path, each item accompanied by short practical examples taken from my [Exertion] routine, though of course altered to fit the "common Seeker".
I figured I would just use the same format but adapt it to fit the four means of Aspect advancement.
The details... I couldn't be bothered with recollecting them, so I left [Guided] to figure everything out.
Like that, my pen soon started flowing over new pages of my [Focus] Aspect study, the process itself entirely left to [Guided]'s care, while I [Focus]ed on persevering through embryonic [Cycle] breathing [Exertion]s.
As a fundamental Aspect formed around the concept of elevating one's attention, of the four means of Aspect advancement—Assimilation, Conception, Utilization, and Dissemination—solely Assimilation and Utilization are relevant to the [Focus] Aspect's advancement...
Aspect Advanced: [Focus] (Tier 0) ➞ [Focus] (Tier 1)
When my [Focus] Aspect advanced and I found my [Focus] sublimed to a new level that brought with it a [Clarity] of thoughts I only ever attained through [Focus]ed [Will] manifestation before...
I instantly knew my future [Exertion] routines would, from then on, only result in greater Essence development.
Something that would force me and [Guided] to, once again, further restrict my routine's [Exertion] choices to the more and more extreme ones in terms of time and energy requirements.
Practically, that would translate into longer hours invested in Sentinel assignments and even longer hours dedicated to asphyxiating myself while slogging through the finickiest parts of synthesizing the [Secrecy], [Comprehension], [Awareness], and now [Clarity] Aspects.
Still...
It sounded absolutely ludicrous to merely think about it, but actually...
If, by the time I achieved my first Aspect synthesis, I had failed to sufficiently develop my Essence, and the Aspect I synthesized translated into yet more Essence development efficiency...
I feared that regardless of the sort of [Exertion]s I pursued, they would genuinely never be slow enough for me to avoid reaching a dangerous threshold of Essence overdevelopment disorder.
I could only narrow down and complicate my anti-overdevelopment [Exertion]s so much.
What could I further remove from the [Exertion] of throwing hundreds of metal bits in the air and having to catch them all without relying on my sight, the sound they produced, and without having anything land on me, to further [Focus] exclusively on my |Awareness] Aspect synthesis without risking advancing my [Perception]?
At some point, before it entered inane [Exertion]s territory, I would have to forcefully spend some of my time idling about.
Neither reading in fear of advancing my [Insight] Aspect, nor maintaining my [Cycle] at its most basic sustenance intensity, nor exercising, nor manifesting my [Will], nor even flying too hard...
No way.
I refused.
But my [Will]ingness was irrelevant on that matter.
What an absurd situation that would be to be forced to laze about for such contradictory reasons...
Why were there so few books talking about how to deal with Essence overdevelopment, and none that catered expressly to my circumstances?
I could not believe I was the sole Essence Entity to have ever faced this issue, nor could I believe I was the first Origin Essence Entity to have formed an Origin Aspect that relentlessly augmented my Essence development.
There was simply no way.
That line of questioning, by itself, was drastically raising the importance of leaving the Red Sand Sector.
I already nearly died once from Essence overdevelopment-induced Essence mutation, and was now fighting a long-term losing battle against the same issue, because no one had a better answer to give me than to "laze about".
That was not an answer.
I did not want to do that.
Solaena never lazed about.
I would not laze about.
So I decided.
If my hopeless battle against Essence overdevelopment would not solve itself naturally...
Then I would either travel to a Sector where I would find an answer...
Or I would spend decades resorting to the fundamental truth of [Exertion]—or I hoped the fundamental truth of [Cultivation] by that point—by maintaining my Essence on the edge of entering a state of overdevelopment to form an Aspect that finally solved this damning issue.
I refused to lie in idleness.
It simply defied the foundation of my Path.
It also contradicted my [Ambition]s.
[Omnipotence] may be an impossibility, and finding or reviving my mother may be a whimsical dream I was mostly indifferent about, but they were still what I aspired to.
Hence...
It was time for me to more than seriously contemplate leaving the Red Sand Sector.
As for my [Focus] Aspect's advancement to Tier 1...
I didn't really think much about it other than it being a useful reminder that there was no unique and immutable method to advancing one's Aspects.
But I already knew that.
And [Guided] also already knew that.
So we both swiftly forgot about it.
We had books on neighboring Sectors to read.