Emerging from the untroubled depths of sleep-induced unconsciousness, many things struck me as odd from the instant my first conscious thought formed.
I did not want to wake up.
I knew I should wake up.
I didn't want to do anything.
I knew I needed to enter a state of communion as soon as I could.
Everything felt new.
Everything felt totally ordinary.
I couldn't muster a single scrap of [Will].
[Guided] told me I could.
That I should.
And that I would do so right there and then.
Somehow, in a bizarre state of mind that I barely grasped, I slipped into my morning communion.
I didn't want to grapple with the thousands of expressions that manifested through my Essence, but somehow, I did.
My [Will] and [Cultivation] Aspects were still in the midst of their respective advancement disorder.
One was obviously ending, though.
My [Cultivation] Aspect looked on the verge of advancing to Tier 1.
Like with my [Awareness] Tier 1 Aspect advancement, it was obviously different from my prior Tier 1 Aspect advancement experiences.
Probably because it was an Aspect formed from such a vast concept...
My [Will] straight up couldn't be bothered to apprehend all the subtleties of this vastness, though.
[Guided] told me I could, should, and would bother myself.
One way or another, the effort feeling both herculean and insignificant, I started taking in everything that could be taken from the changes my Essence was incurring.
Aspect Advanced: [Cultivation] (Tier 0) ➞ [Cultivation] (Tier 1)
I didn't know how long it took.
It could have been as short as a minute or as long as multiple hours, but in the end, I saw the conclusion of the disorder through.
From its widespread surges to its finest ruffles, I had taken my communion so deep that none had escaped me.
Now, finally, I could stop and-
[Guided] commanded me to extricate myself from my bed and start heading for the infirmary.
I didn't want to.
I did.
My lack of [Will] forbidding me from taking the usual way, I wormed my way to the edge of my bed, looked down at the three-meter-high drop, and...
Wormed on.
The first beat of my wings felt like flapping metal.
I fully expected to drop down like a fairy who overestimated how much weight she could lift, but somehow, I didn't.
I just... started hovering lazily, slowly drifting towards wherever my wings [Will]ed.
And it seemed my wings [Will]ed me to escape my room through one astutely dissimulated passage, end up outside the spire hosting my room, and dive lethargically towards the infirmary.
The next what-felt-like million hours, I spent them wading through a sea of disgusting bodies that didn't want to open themselves to my [Awareness] and [Will]ing the obvious holes in their biological makeup that didn't belong.
How people could be so incapable as to force [Guided] to force me to expend my precious little energy to help them was truly beyond me.
If only they could all drop dead...
That way I wouldn't have to waste my time with them...
And I could return to the warm, soft, quiet embrace of my bed...
Another what-felt-like million hours later, I wound up stabbing people after living through the nightmarish equipping of my Sentinel gear.
I so wanted to give up, but as it turned out, [Guided] and my stupid [Cultivation] colluded together to make certain I could not give up through running out of energy.
Ultimately, it was me catching a beautiful localized density event transpiring through my Essence during a short communion that finally compelled [Guided] to see me or what I really was, and it finally sent me to a quiet location where I was finally able to let my mind and body wander wherever.
Wouldn’t I know it, however, following a short ten or twenty hours of peacefully rummaging through soft documents that didn't warrant me lifting more than a finger for them, at the first signs of my mind starting to strain, despite my [Awareness] being perfectly capable of continuing...
[Guided] ordered me back to my room.
I didn't want to.
I eventually took off, and, following a lazy flight of fancy, crashed into my bed, didn't bother changing my bodysuit, and espoused the bliss that was being [Guided] to isolate myself from all my senses, stop thinking, and fall asleep without a worry in the world.
When I next stirred and all of my prior day's incidents came back to me, at first, I couldn't believe it.
Nevertheless, ultimately, my [Will] Aspect having momentarily fluctuated back to what my morning communion shortly, ambiguously made out to be somewhat of a stable phase, I had to face reality.
The reality that, for the foreseeable future, until my [Will] Aspect's Tier 3 advancement concluded, I would get to experience a plethora of new experiences.
And thinking about these new experiences...
[Guided] (Origin)[Cultivation] (Tier 1)[Insight] (Tier 2)[Awareness] (Tier 1)[Darkness] (Tier 1)[Will] (Tier 2)[Focus] (Tier 2)[Harmony] (Tier 0)
[Harmony].
I had my doubts as to its potential effectiveness when it came to contending against something as insidious as Essence corruption.
Now, following the fragments I remembered from when I formed it and how it came to implement itself during my period of [Null] [Will], those doubts had been put to relative rest.
It certainly felt weird to now hold all of my contradictory thoughts in a new state of [Harmony] where I didn't feel the need to resolve them, but other than that, the [Harmony] Aspect was what it was...
And I gladly welcomed it as part of my Essence and a mainstay of my Path.
Not that its formation had successfully addressed my most urgent issue by far.
It even did the opposite.
My Essence overdevelopment troubles were now of ever-higher relevancy, because by the time my [Will] Aspect's Tier 3 advancement completed, I did not see a world where my daily Essence development quota wouldn't be reduced to...
Nearly nothing?
I didn't want to think about it, but with my [Cultivation] Aspect having advanced to Tier 1, and my [Will] Aspect about to advance to Tier 3...
My Essence development efficiency would only be more excessive than it already was.
And at this point, facing the likelihood of spending sixteen hours trapped in idleness for every few I could devote to [Cultivation], my uniqueness definitely couldn't be the sole source of this wrongness.
There was absolutely no way an Essence Entity should be able to develop itself in mere weeks into a state of Essence overdevelopment.
The extensive reading I conducted on the subject was unanimous on the matter of how complex and demanding entering into a state of Essence overdevelopment was.
Yet, the [Truth] was also what it was.
I entered a critical state of Essence overdevelopment once, incurred an Essence mutation that could have hypothetically killed me, and since then, was [Guided] to never near that threshold again through meticulous communion and development routine optimization.
So really, my [Insight]s on the whole issue couldn't be more straightforward.
Hence...
That left only a single possibility.
I was missing crucial [Knowledge].
A conclusion that was, insofar, unsurprising as I held in mind the abysmal development level of the Red Sand Sector.
Also a conclusion I had reached many times before, yet one I remained powerless to remedy, having failed to gain the means to act upon it.
In any case, the conclusion remained the same.
At the end of the day, and for the manifold hundreds of days that would follow from today onwards, the proportion of my time devoted to being idle would only grow more and more ridiculous.
As I allowed this realization of impending idleness to cascade through my being, it felt...
Strange.
I had known for months now that neither specializing nor prioritizing my [Cultivation] would solve my overdevelopment at its root, but for it to happen so brusquely...
I really wanted to...
Something shifted in my Essence, and still being in the midst of my deep morning communion, I beheld in its glorious entirety how my [Will] Aspect as if ignited as it resumed its Tier 3 advancement process with a resplendent surge of [Chaos].
Observing such wondrous phenomena, I instantly knew what I really wanted to do.
If my Essence development was soon to enter a long period of [Nothing]...
Then I wanted my every second of unbound [Cultivation] to truly allow me to give it my everything.
To the [Void] with holding back!
Simply contemplating the idea of how far I would have come had I never allowed myself to be restrained by hypotheticals such as potentially lethal Essence mutations, I just wanted to explode!
Wondrously, instead of telling me to [Focus] on my self-[Awareness] and repress myself as always, this time, [Guided] only had one command for me.
Absolutely bottom myself out.
I was all too thrilled to oblige.
Pulling out of communion, I already knew exactly where, what, and how I wanted to unleash my everything for the first time in a long, long time.
Not five minutes later, I flew into one of the infirmary wards reserved for those facing long and arduous [Recovery], individuals whose Paths were effectively regarded as crippled, much like the bodies they owned that had consigned them to this place to begin with.
At last, I came upon a closed door, which I kicked the handle of, causing it to open.
"What is it, Solaena?"
Before I could utter my first word, Guardian Elric, the perfect specimen, called me out.
Not that it mattered.
Flying right to him, I landed on his limbless, incapacitated body that wasn't even able to maintain itself alive without the daily intervention of healers due to its missing organs.
"It was between healing and punching Warriors until they spilled their guts on the training grounds," I told him, perfectly aware that without context, my words meant very little.
"What?"
I couldn't find it in me to care about whether he understood or not, so I ignored him and finally started manifesting my [Will] as I should have months ago, when I first felt frustration gnawing at me from the inside.
With the horrendous state of his body, it took but the weakest sliver of my [Will] to enhance my [Awareness] enough to fully apprehend the condition of the Essence Entity's physical vessel I personally saved from death.
Finally, only one last thing remained for me to do.
Something I should have done the day I first thought of the idea.
It wasn't about [Will] healing.
It was about me.
About how far I could push my own [Will] through sheer [Will] alone.
I [Will]ed Guardian Elric's embryonic form of his digestive tract and its associated blood vessels back into existence.
That was it.
Straightforward.
Basic.
But that's what made it oh-so [Will] intensive.
[Ideal].
There was no tenth, fifth, quarter, or half of my energy.
I did away with all of it.
For what I wanted to do, my energy was naught but a burden I wished to part with.
My [Will] manifested like a raging fire to my [Awareness], engulfing Guardian Elric and causing him to start using his vocal cords to say things I couldn't be bothered to make sense of.
The powerless had no rights to make themselves heard.
In mere seconds, weakness started coursing through me, apprising me of my lacking ability to sustain my own [Will].
Were it any other time, I would have been receptive, I would have taken the road of accepting what both myself and reality were telling me.
This wasn't such a time.
Reading, learning, studying, training, building relationships.
Those were tools.
Means of reaching understanding, of accumulating leverage, of positioning oneself along a Path that was never meant to remain static.
And like all tools, their value was conditional.
They existed to serve intent, not to define it.
When that intent shifted, when their function no longer aligned with necessity, there was no inherent tragedy in their abandonment.
Only inefficiencies in clinging to them beyond their usefulness.
And when the time came that they served no purpose anymore, tools were made to be discarded.
Not out of malice.
Out of continuation.
This was a lesson that was engraved into my being the day I was born.
A lesson that [Guided] me through things many refused to acknowledge the existence of, even when I forcibly [Will]ed upon them my own memories.
At long last, the last drop of my energy finally disappeared, and I found myself faced with that which I had long avoided, out of it being unneeded.
What lay beyond the end.
I shrugged off the surge of weakness that invaded my mind and body.
It was irrelevant.
I had already learned to deal with it before I even defeated hunger for the first time and had only begun to acquaint myself with pain.
I readied myself.
[Guided] chimed its accord.
I gathered all the frustrations that endlessly built up as a result of my own Essence being unable to develop itself at a pace that didn't force upon me the nightmare that was idleness.
I remembered all the times I felt powerless.
I grounded myself in my own insignificance in the grand scheme of reality.
And I [Will]ed the healing to continue.
My mind and body promptly attempted to pull me under.
I refused.
[Guided] refused.
My [Will] refused.
My [Cultivation] [Cycle] started shaking violently, threatening to shatter.
My [Awareness] shortly followed suit, the burden it imposed on me climbing exponentially.
My entire body felt like it had been plunged into an inferno, my legs gave out, and my muscles started spasming violently.
My vision became a jumbled kaleidoscope of otherworldly colors, and sensations I couldn't distinguish if they were real or not started wreaking havoc, attempting vainly to break my [Focus].
It was so much more than I anticipated...
Yet, at the same time...
It was such a pathetic hardship to withstand to allow me to manifest my true [Will] into reality.
Guardian Elric, of course, had something to say about it, considering how agitated he was becoming, but it seemed he was finally coming to terms with his powerlessness, as with each second that passed, he had to devote that much more of himself to dealing with the mounting healing I was inflicting upon him.
On my part, while every second felt like an entire hour, and the cost of manifesting my [Will] kept on mounting exponentially, it remained...
Utterly insignificant.
I eventually lost control of my body entirely, my [Awareness] became such a jumbled mess as to become worthless, my [Cultivation] worsened to the extent of starting to slowly asphyxiate me...
But...
That was it.
A broken body.
Asphyxiation.
Blinded.
Those were hardships I crushed years ago, and if I needed to do so again, I could.
And I would.
At once, I redirected all of my [Will] towards myself.
I forced my [Cultivation] to resume, refusing to take a breath.
I stood up on legs that only wanted to give up, with the entire body they supported seemingly solely dedicated towards obstructing the continued manifestation of my [Will] upon reality.
There was no thrill or satisfaction at pushing myself so far beyond what I previously [Will]ingly accepted as my limits.
Merely indifference.
I may have accepted that my Essence was deficient in its development capacity, but I never allowed comparison of any sort to ever taint my own drive to grow.
Everything I was doing.
Everything I was enduring.
Everything I planned on accomplishing.
I was doing it for myself and myself only.
Some books claimed that power inevitably corrupted, as though it were an actual Essence corruption that seeped into anything it touched.
Others insisted power did nothing of the sort, that it merely stripped away pretense until only what had always been there remained, laid bare and undeniable.
As I somehow came to reflect on this [Truth] in my current state, not even my [Harmony] had the time to intervene before I had attained a conclusion so obvious I felt nothing could deny it, deny me.
The individuals who wrote that obviously didn't know what they were talking about.
How could power ever corrupt when a concept like [Omnipotence] existed?
Only a lacking and defective Path would see one corrupted by the very power they ought to acquire through it.
My Path.
My Path, which began when a transient confluence of Essence forced my existence upon an unknown fairy who most certainly couldn't support me.
My Path, which saw me form my Origin Aspect through circumstances I could not remember.
My Path, which demanded that I form two Aspects before my first spark of [Awareness] had even come into being.
My Path.
Picturing where it led, I saw nothing.
Because there was no peak or apex for me to reach.
That's what everything I learned about Essence was about, after all.
Essence could grow endlessly.
A single grain of rust powder could one day become a new Realm.
Whole Realms could be annihilated in mere seconds.
Time was just another restraint shackling those unable to shatter it.
My Path had no destination, for there should not be one, for there was no need for one.
My Path sufficed to itself.
As my Path was meant to.
Aspect Formed: [Ambition] (Tier 0)
Suddenly, at the same time as I felt something snap into place in my Essence, my [Will] began flooding through my existence like an endless spring.
My [Awareness] came into [Focus].
My [Cultivation] stabilized.
My body stopped threatening to collapse.
All of that came at a price, of course.
The price being that the burden I carried had quietly magnified to a degree I could no longer meaningfully quantify.
And this burden...
I was feeling it.
At last.
I was finally touching upon my truest limits.
"Are you alright?"
Annoyingly, the future [Faith]ful I had decided to heal as a convenient option, picked that time to very insistently ask me a question.
I wanted to continue ignoring him to [Focus] exclusively on locating my exact limits, but this time, [Guided] informed me it would change nothing.
Whether I answered or not, I would locate my limits one way or another.
"I feel perfectly alright," I succinctly told him.
"You're bleeding from all your orifices," he pointlessly told me, as if I hadn't already known that thanks to my returned [Awareness], "And you're glowing."
Oh?
Was I?
My [Awareness] discerned nothing aside from my own [Will] covering me, which could reasonably explain such a description of my current state.
Said current state being that of carrying a rampant burden.
A burden that was beginning to impose degrees of strain I failed to recall ever having endured before.
I had no cognitive load to dedicate to the task of comprehending what such levels of strain entailed, but what I knew, from the most visceral depth of my existence...
Was that I felt liberated.
And strained.
In unequal amounts.
“Thanks for the healing, by the way. Though I have my doubts about its functionality. Unless a stomach with the thickness of my nonexistent hair and intestines connected to absolutely nothing are considered acceptable biological design.”
In the time it took Guardian Elric to utter his poor jest, the inequality further rose, and this time it did so to the extent that [Guided] allowed me to discontinue our pointless conversation.
"Your [Awareness] is as crippled as you are."
I gladly did so.
"What's that supposed to..."
Then I shut out everything that did not directly contribute to sustaining the manifestation of my sole [Will] to persevere.
Defying the impossible was what I was born to do, what my Path was meant to accomplish, what my Essence and the Origin Aspect that suffused it had always enabled me to achieve.
Crushing burden that reduced my thoughts to a shattered mess or not, that would never change.
Thus, I endured.
Till it stopped being about me.
Till my feeble body betrayed me.
Till my own [Will] Aspect became unable to bear with what I demanded of it.
Then, everything started breaking down.
My [Awareness] was filled with [Darkness].
My [Cultivation] disintegrated.
My own mind stopped answering me.
As I discerned the encroaching [Darkness], my last thought went to how much [Cultivation] would be required to bring everything that failed up to the level where they would be capable of living up to my Path.
As for whether I had gone too far with whatever it was I did or not?
I didn't care.
I couldn't care.
A shattered mind.
A broken body.
An overdeveloped Essence.
The worst that could happen, I already lived through it and came out the other side with another step taken on my Path.
If it came down to it, I would happily welcome a straight month of unconsciousness.
At least that way, I would be able to go through a full day of [Cultivation] without fearing my Essence imploding.