Prevailing over the force that sought to keep me unconscious, I once again awoke to find myself in this strange reality where consciousness and unconsciousness met.
I couldn't be bothered.
I [Will]ed my body to emerge from its comatose state.
Success took the form of my [Awareness] expanding anew, feeding me details of everything that was going on around and inside me.
It wasn't a pretty sight, but ugly it might be, so long as I was still alive, damages were rendered altogether irrelevant in the face of sustained [Will] utilization.
This time wouldn't be an exception.
I [Will]ed the healing to begin, [Guided] going over my every action for mistakes before approving of them.
There was a resistance, the same that always manifested when I pushed my [Will] too far, but as I had already proven that such an issue could be efficiently dealt with employing more [Will], I terminated it like the minor hassle it was.
While doing so, I also subconsciously restarted my [Cultivation], going for the most optimal mixed physiological-[Recovery] [Cultivation] [Cycle].
I stopped my breathing.
I expelled all the filth that had accumulated while I wasn't there to deal with it.
I slowed my heart rate...
Once all that needed attending had been dealt with, finally, I opened my eyes.
The ward I was in looked like the same private ward I used for my third attempt at my disjointed neurons hypothesis method.
A third attempt that I still did not know whether it failed or succeeded.
That was only on the [Guided] Essence [Cultivation] front, though.
One thing I most definitely succeeded at was proving myself to be the kind of [Worthy] Stavros told me I was, and that, without [Guided].
I was wholly disinterested in receiving commendations from external factors, but ascertaining this fundamental difference between me and [Guided] definitely made my Path more rounded than before, and I couldn't ignore Stavros' contributions to making it such.
Mentors were really a nice thing to have.
Competent mentors, that was.
With no reason to waste time on feeling good about myself, I proceeded with slipping into a deep communion.
I didn't know how long my mind was kept under, but from the state of my Essence overdevelopment disorder, I would say between one and six days.
The only way I could deduce the exact time would be to know how much Essence development my third attempt resulted in, and from there, I would be able to estimate whether I incurred four days, a week, a week and a half, or even two weeks of Essence development.
Knowing that stepping outside my ward would be all it took to answer that, I removed myself from communion and cast off the blanket covering me to take off.
A well-placed kick at the door handle later, the usual animated mood of the infirmary washed over me.
Not a minute later, one of the aides caught sight of me and, after being pointlessly stunned for a quarter of that, provided me with indications as to who had been in charge of me, what day it was, and another small detail my [Awareness] failed to catch in the rush of my emergence.
Reentering my private ward to change into the bodysuit they provided me for when I woke up, I then went out of my way to locate Archivist Trius to inform me of my self-discharge, receiving an undeserved bit of what I supposed to be scolding after I did so.
With the knowledge that I wasted a whole six days by being uselessly unconscious, I set off for the sanctuary to retrieve my possessions, which Lorekeeper Avenorium had conveniently taken temporary possession of for one reason or another.
I doubted he failed to hold himself from browsing through all the notebooks I brought with me, but I guessed it didn't matter, given that I didn't have anything to hide.
Better yet, in a corner of my mind, I hoped he actually went through my notebooks, and they provoked such [Inspiration] in him that he ended up delivering me a new notebook filled with [Insight]s I had yet to have.
Not that I believed this was even a possibility.
When I found Lorekeeper Avenorium, he proved my assumption concerning his unconcerned persona true by simply handing me back my backpack, congratulating me on a research project well-led, and ending with a follow-up inquiry about when I intended to conduct my first attempt at my second method.
As he had yet to prove himself unreliable beyond his general approach to life, I answered him with my best estimations.
A week or so.
Possibly two, if my latest attempt had uncovered something worth dedicating a serious in-depth [Cultivation] for.
Parting with Lorekeeper Avenorium after convening to a similar arrangement to our last, I promptly isolated myself in an underlayer study room, unpacked all my writing implements, and resumed where my last attempt left off.
I did not [Will] anything.
I did not enter a state of hyper-[Focus] or hyper-[Awareness].
I simply got into a deep state of Essence communion, and then...
Proceeded to leave [Guided] to carry out what may be [Guided] Essence [Cultivation].
The whispers immediately started making themselves heard.
My body and mind wanted to react.
I denied them.
For once, I truly had no part to play.
It was all up to [Guided] to sift through the desert's worth of grains of sand in data that I collected over what I was informed had been a nearly hour-long attempt session.
I endured the weight of my [Ambition] on my own for one whole hour.
If that wasn't the ultimate proof that doubts were just another kind of flaw I had to purge from my being, lest it poison and warp my Path, then what was?
Tens of thousands of whispers later, I ended my first post-attempt research session with an outcome most Seekers researching [Insight]s worth pondering forming the [Mystery] Aspect over had to have reached a million times.
Disjointed neurons hypothesis.
Success or failure cannot be determined due to insufficient data and baseline references.
Reevaluate results once a second methodology has been tested and a comparative analysis can be performed.
Jotting down these words in my notebook, I couldn't have been more certain that if it had been my thousandth time writing those words, I could have come to the conclusion that my base [Insight] had been a fantasy.
Instead, as it was merely the first method of my fourth avenue of research for making [Guided] Essence [Cultivation] a reality, I felt...
Nothing.
Failure was a result I had anticipated.
Failure was similarly the result I expected for the three remaining methods I planned to attempt.
It was that unsophisticated.
It wasn't like this avenue of research was one that permitted iteration by seeking [Inisght]s from what I already learned.
No.
This post-attempt research session was the first and the last.
And when it led [Guided] nowhere despite the support of an entire month's worth of searching for ways to make [Guided] Essence [Cultivation] work, that was all there was to it.
It was a failure.
For now, [Guided] Essence [Cultivation] kept its status as an [Ideal].
Thus, I moved on.
First on my list of non-Essence development-inducing activities was to resume my conceptual [Cultivation] of [Purity].
A reminder of my awesomeness so as to reignite others' [Inspiration] in their [Ideal]ized image of me also wouldn't be missed.
And who knew if the answer to [Guided] Essence [Cultivation] wouldn't come to me while I was taking a stroll through the Red Sand Realm?
On the subject of the Red Sand Realm, I wondered when the first news from the Order's expedition would return...
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
With the disjointed neurons hypothesis having proven a dead end in terms of either providing a direct answer or advancing the realization of [Guided] Essence [Cultivation], I did not hold much hope when the time came to effectuate the first attempt of my next method.
After all, what were the chances my embryonic self had somehow glimpsed something relevant about its own Essence while forming its Origin Aspect?
Nearly non-existent.
A state of Essence communion possessing sufficient depth, [Clarity], and duration to be useful to my quest was not something one stumbled into accidentally.
Such a state required deliberate [Will].
Still, there remained the possibility that a sufficiently absurd combination of circumstances had conspired to produce precisely that outcome.
The odds were negligible, but not impossible.
"Forgotten communions hypothesis, first attempt, commencing," I announced.
"Go on," Lorekeeper Avenorium, as was becoming usual, answered casually.
I hadn't expected anything else.
I [Will]ed for all forgotten fragments of sensations related to communing with my Essence prior to having formed my Origin Aspect to come back to me.
Half of my free energy invested later, a first sensation came back to me.
A sort of static, flat impression of something.
By the time the entirety of my energy reserve was spent, the static acquired some subtle variations.
Once my [Ambition] took on the burden of pursuing this [Will] manifestation, those subtle variations became increasingly clearer.
Clear enough for [Guided] to instruct me to slowly cease this attempt before delivering a lackluster, if foreseen, conclusion.
"Forgotten communions hypothesis, first attempt, entire energy reserve invested, [Ambition] threshold crossed, unambivalent failure," I stated without any embellishment.
Such was the outcome of this first, and probably last, attempt at my forgotten communions hypothesis.
"Failure requires no cause. Success does," without any reason to do so, Lorekeeper Avenorium needlessly shared some of what he perceived as wisdom, but sounded more like a pointless waste of learning time to me.
"Has learning such sayings ever actually inspired you? Or did you only learn about them due to being unable to handle your own uncountable failures?" I countered.
"Uncountable is a bit harsh, considering I remember each and every one of them," he counterargued with an easy indifference that spoke to me.
"The point, though, isn't that I learned thousands of such sayings. The point is that, when it comes to Seeker research projects, failure is the rule and success the exception."
"Whether you're a fool or a genius changes little in that regard. The journey remains the same, with only the magnitude of the failure differing."
That indifference...
It was the same indifference that [Guided] urged me to adopt whenever I encountered failure.
Not the indifference of dismissing failure as meaningless, but the kind that precluded me from lingering upon it in the futile hope of salvaging what was already lost.
"Well, then, at least on that point, we understand each other," I admitted, then jumped off the private ward's bed to begin writing down the abject failure I just experienced in all its nonexistent details.
“Fail often enough, and you will realize failure is the rule, while success is the deviation. Anyway, always ready to serve the younger generation. Until next time, which I suspect will occur sooner rather than later, little Solaena.”
Leaving behind yet another of his unnecessary sayings, along with the implicit confirmation that he intended to continue acting as my research assistant of sorts, Lorekeeper Avenorium departed and left me to my own thoughts.
A quarter of an hour later, I did the same, freeing the private ward and officially concluding the day's session.
Having done little beyond burdening myself with a lightweight [Ambition] [Cultivation], I quickly set aside the resulting Essence development and turned my attention toward refining the first implementation of my third method.
While having learned that there was a [Void] where any forgotten communion-based sensations could have theoretically been had not brought me any closer to success, it at least provided me with the [Knowledge] of this direction having been a wrong one.
That's what failure was for.
Nevertheless, how that new bit of [Comprehension] ought to reflect onto my hypothetical [Guided] subsumption method was all up to me.
A mere two days later, I was confident in the answer I had reached and the refinement it led to, and so scheduled my first attempt that very day.
"[Guided] subsumption hypothesis, first attempt, commencing," I disclosed.
"Just keep in [Mind] that progress is built from a mountain of failures crowned by a single success."
Disregarding Lorekeeper Avenorium's usual strange words of encouragement, I [Focus]ed...
...and [Will]ed my entire existence to be subsumed into [Guided], the Origin Aspect that suffused every facet of my Essence.
[Darkness] swallowed everything.
My [Awareness], my body, my mind, all were consumed by [Darkness] in what felt like an instant.
Then...
[Focus].
A single command rippled through reality itself.
No.
Not a command.
An impression.
A conception of how reality ought to bend to my existence.
Something shifted, and [Focus] reigned.
Then came a new thought that could not be denied...
[Harmony].
Followed by another...
[Insight].
And another, and another...
[Cultivation].
[Awareness].
[Will].
All manner of familiar concepts were invoked, each imposing its own constraints by being manifested and by interaction with all the concepts already conjured.
Until...
[Ambition] was invoked.
Things became frantic.
Still, they remained manageable.
I reiterated [Focus] and [Harmony] every second.
I merged [Awareness] with the flow.
I directed all [Insight]s where they ought to be...
This went on until there simply weren't any more ways to endure that I could fathom.
All I could do from there was wait until the last barriers inexorably crumbled, and [Darkness] claimed all.
◇ ◈ ◈ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◈ ◈ ◇
When I next came to, it was once again to this bizarre in-between state.
I [Will]ed my body awake, expecting my [Awareness] to spread any second.
That didn't happen.
Instead, upon [Will]ing my body awake, a resistance like I had never met rose up to prevent me from doing so.
For one second, I contended with the belief that the resistance was so immense that I would be stuck in this in-between state for the foreseeable future...
Then I truly [Will]ed my body awake, and the previously immense-feeling resistance swiftly dissolved into nothing, restoring my [Awareness] to what it should be.
Also, I discovered one of the potential culprits behind why I wound up suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness in the wake of pushing myself in the way of having triggered my [Ambition] Aspect.
My body was a proper wreck.
Ruptured blood vessels.
Widespread muscle damage.
Damaged lung and brain tissues.
That was sufficient damage for me to look at an estimate of two to four days of intensive [Guided] [Will] healing.
That I had absolutely no memory of ever pushing myself to such a degree was more worrying than my prospective intensive [Guided] [Will] healing, however.
Lapsing into communion, I at least confirmed my Essence overdevelopment disorder hadn't worsened to the extent of putting me in danger.
That was one worry less.
Once I ascertained the sustainability and integrity of my existence, that's when my thoughts drifted towards the perpetrator of this odd turn of events.
"[Guided] subsumption, first attempt... unknown effect, potentially hazardous," I muttered, noting the persistent metallic taste of blood and the lingering soreness throughout my throat.
Then, after the [Comprehension], came the [Clarity].
This was, had been, ostensibly... a textbook example of serendipity.
I failed to find what I sought, yet discovered something equally worthwhile.
In this case, [Will]ing myself to be subsumed into my Origin Aspect had produced consequences I could not wait to hear Lorekeeper Avenorium describe through the meticulous and comprehensive [Perception] of his [Assessment].
Be that as it may, first things first...
Mending my physical vessel.
Alternatively named...
The best excuse for me to exceed my Essence development quota.