Tyler was running, but he wasn’t sure why. Everything around him was distorted, the air tinged violet as thick flurries of purple snow fell from the sky. His limbs hurt, but somehow it was a distant pain, not quite reaching him.

  Crash.

  Something was going on above him. He saw flashes of bright emerald light. He turned around, and a ginormous dragon swooped down and engulfed him.

  But instead of its throat, he found himself in a cave, surrounded by duneclaws.

  They chittered as they circled him, and he gritted his teeth, calling his mana in the pattern that he’d just learned. But it just sloshed uselessly inside of him.

  The duneclaws pounced, striking one after another, scoring gash after gash on his body. Each wound carried with it the power of magic, and he realized he was the only one without it. Their shrieks were so loud, so all-consuming as they slowly devoured him alive.

  He screamed, begging for the energy to come back, to give him the strength to fight off these creatures. But a creeping purple mist was coming for him from all directions. The next thing he knew, he was submerged in a vast kaleidoscopic sea, the sensations so bright he couldn’t shut them out —

  And then he wasn’t in the cave anymore, but on dry grass.

  Smoke. Burning rubber. Airbags.

  Blurry figures standing above him, distorted voices.

  “He’s still conscious —”

  “Ohmygosh —”

  “How could you? What are you doing to him —”

  “Oh my gosh, guys, I think he broke my arm —”

  “How dare you? I'm going to show you, I'm gonna —”

  “Hold him down. Get him drunk.”

  — – —

  Tyler shot awake with a full-body jerk.

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

  He trembled as he heaved for air on the cool cave floor, the motion aggravating the dark-red scabs that lined his chest in two separate areas. The flesh of his left calf was mangled by the duneclaw’s pincer, and its sharp chitin had cut deep into the skin of his right foot as he’d delivered his final blows. Every joint and ligament in his body felt like it was on the verge of snapping, and a cacophony of bruises dotted his skin.

  What just happened? How the fuck was that all real?

  Even after awakening from the dream, some part of him felt like he was still in a nightmare.

  He could have died a thousand times back there. He’d be dead if he hadn’t had the Core of Protection, or if he’d been a second slower to block, or even if his throw had just been a little off.

  From the Storm to the dragon to the island, and even Savadiere himself. It was just a mess of terror and overwhelm and his primal instinct for self-preservation. He hadn’t caught a fucking break since those first purple sparks.

  He made a sound, and it came out as half-laugh half-sob.

  That was absolutely fucking terrifying.

  Even during the accident, his own mortality had never felt so goddamn fragile.

  And now he was stuck on the floor, unable to move a muscle without feeling like his entire body was tearing itself apart. The energy within him was placid now, brimming with potential but without any spark to light it into action.

  “Ugh.”

  For a moment, he just lay there in silence.

  He could hear chittering outside — some cousins of the monster that had attacked him, maybe. He could hear the tip-tapping of their chitinous legs against the ground, the constant scraping of their claws against anything and everything that surrounded them. Specifically, at least one of them was scraping against the log at the door. Over and over and over again.

  All he could do was hope that it wasn’t strong enough to get through.

  Tyler groaned.

  The stone was cold. Not nearly as bad as the chill of his apartment, but enough to make his joints feel like they’d been bound and wrapped in plaster. Or maybe that was just the metric ton of injuries that plagued him, combined with the hard, unforgiving surface he’d fallen asleep on.

  He was reminded of the endless days he’d spent in his dinky little bed, longing to get up, to do anything, but being held down in a vice grip by the poisonous cocktail of pain and hopelessness that had plagued him since the crash. How many times had he almost hoped for something to force him out into the world, just to prove to himself that he still had that undying spark that he’d carried with him for the first seventeen years of his life?

  And finally, something had. He’d nearly died about a gazillion times. He was weak, injured, and stuck on the floor in a dark spooky cave.

  But he’d done it. And as the sweet tingle of survival spread through him once more, he found a smile creeping onto his face.

  “God, I’m alive!”

  In some way, the pain had never felt so good. It represented his struggle, his triumph over both himself and the monstrous thing that had been out to get him. It meant that he was still living. Whatever else was going on, he knew for a fact you couldn’t feel nearly so much agony if you were dead.

  And his mind was filled with more of those weird messages.

  Congratulations! You have Awakened a Novice Resonance with the Aspect of Resilience.

  The Aspect of Resilience. He didn't know what the fuck that meant, but he'd felt something change within him as the fight with the duneclaw had gone on, something that fittingly Resonated with his actions. And it was a Novice — or maybe he was the Novice that the Resonance belonged to?

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Whatever the case, there was a faint buzzing going on in his soul, something deep and rich that he couldn't quite understand. Just sensing it was enough to get him excited, despite his rather helpless situation.

  You have consumed a Storm-Touched treasure. Curse Class: Primordial Infinity.

  And all of this was a consequence of the banana. The Curse of Primordial Infinity.

  Those Cursed with Primordial Infinity are bound in paradox, just as the Primordials of old. Their souls are limitlessly large, infinite in potential, and yet forever bound to the confines of the body. One’s meridians remain eternally locked, their mana unable to affect the outside world despite its unending volume.

  The first part of the description felt very true. The thing within him that he assumed was his pool of mana felt immeasurably large, so vast that he couldn't quite catch the edges of it — just the churning, rippling waves of green that appeared on its surface. It was ginormous, and yet also contained entirely within him. Within his soul, he thought.

  But he didn't quite understand the other side of the Curse. It felt like it was saying he'd never be able to use his mana, but he'd certainly felt an effect during the fight. Even now he could feel it seeping into his mangled limbs, passively helping just a tiny bit with the myriad of injuries clinging to him.

  And Tyler certainly didn’t feel like the second part applied to him.

  For most, this Curse represents a fate of eternal torment, of boundless potential but the inability to wield it. The majority of those who are cursed with Primordial Infinity die powerless and pitiful, full of anger and regret.

  A fate of eternal torment sounded horrific, but that wasn’t quite where he was at, was he? Sure, he felt a bit powerless, but that had been his whole life since the crash. But now he had magic — even if it was constrained — and if anything, he felt the least regret that he had in years. In fact…

  He realized that whole description sounded a lot more like himself before this whole thing.

  Even before this, he had been cursed, in a sense. Cursed by his inflammation, by those fuckers that had taken his future in exchange for their own convenience. He had been powerless. He had been pitiful. And he’d definitely been full of anger and regret.

  He refused to let that happen to him again. At least this Curse came with an upside.

  And even as he tried to fully comprehend the rest of it — even as he really took the time to process his frankly horrid state — his eyes couldn’t stop darting to the end. To the last line of the description.

  But for a select few… they may rise far beyond the realm of imagination.

  Even after reading it for the dozenth time, his body shivered with the words.

  Savadiere had told him that this Curse would give him the potential to rival him — no, to surpass beings like him. He couldn’t even comprehend how, but just the knowledge that there was a path forwards gave him hope.

  Tyler took a deep breath, and started taking stock of the situation.

  The flames on that one table had reduced it to embers, but somehow the coals still glowed — just enough to see. Had he really only been out for such little time? He was absolutely ravenous.

  Now that he’d finished Awakening, the energy within him had gone placid. No spikes of power shot through his limbs, and in his natural state he didn’t even know if he could stand. His entire body radiated pain, worse than anything he’d felt since the night of the crash itself.

  He dove into what he thought was his soul, feeling the mighty pool of power sitting still in this little space by his abdomen. There were lines of sorts streaking through him, connecting that spiritual space with his physical body.

  They were almost like blood vessels — just almost empty, devoid of their version of blood.

  “Was that how the energy affected me?” Tyler wondered.

  He tried to get a feel for his mana. He could just barely slosh it around if he really put his mind to it.

  But even as he tried sloshing it through his channels as best as he could, he felt at most a tiny twinge of energy. He tried once, twice, thrice, but each time the mana just seemed to dissipate back into his core. The pain was making it difficult to concentrate, a constant distraction that pounded his mind no matter how much he tried to ignore it.

  No, he needed a better way.

  What had Savadiere said?

  This is the cave of my ancestral peoples. If you survive, you may learn a great deal by examining their teachings

  His eyes drifted to the jagged carvings above him. At first he'd assumed that they were just cave paintings, art with no practical purpose.

  But now that he looked closer, these depicted humanoid forms — figures with long horns like Savadiere — with their arms outstretched, and their feet planted underneath them. And within them was a series of looping lines, all connected to a deep, burrowed dot in the center of their being.

  Their soul, he thought.

  The Ancestors’ Carvings, depicting the Art of the Sandstorm.

  The figures were arranged in an inverted pyramid, with dozens of carvings at the top narrowing down to just one at the bottom.

  All the ones at the top were so complex that he could hardly understand them, and they involved lines of flowing motion stretching out of their figures’ palms and feet.

  The one on the bottom had that too — a pattern of circulation that seemed to draw from outside the soul before dispersing the energy in a certain way around one’s core. Tyler didn’t even have to try it to realize he couldn’t do that one.

  His channels simply lacked those points that connected the inner soul with the outer world. Meridians, he assumed. All his channels did was feed back inwards, passing through his body before returning to his core. Most of these, in fact, were out of his reach.

  But on the second row from the bottom, the right carving…

  He paid attention to the details in the art, lines of deeper-carved mana swooping through channels in a way that somehow portrayed motion in a static frame. It went this way and then that, looping through the arms and legs into the head and back down through the spinal cord. It hit their horns too, but Tyler simply hoped that he didn't need horns to do this technique.

  He held his breath and started swaying his mana, slowly coaxing it through his channels, feeling the tingling as it rushed against his muscles and bones.

  This felt right, he realized. Like the way that he'd felt when he'd unconsciously enhanced himself during the fight.

  It traveled through his fingers, up his shoulders and into his head. His soul was instinctually moving with it now that the motion was beginning to flow.

  One loop, then another, then another.

  He struggled to keep the cycles going through the haze of pain, but after a dozen tries he succeeded, and he felt that strength settle within him — that soothing power that took the edge off of his endless aches.

  Tyler opened his eyes, gasping. “Holy shit.”

  His body felt powerful, like how it had felt before the car crash — back when he'd been lifting weights every day and running every night. Now that he wasn’t panicking, he could learn to control it.

  He set his hands beside him, slowly pushing himself to a sitting position. He began to move…

  And then his concentration broke.

  He slumped back to the ground, but forced himself back into the task. The duneclaw outside redoubled its efforts to scrape through the log, sending adrenaline spiking back through him. He used the fear and dove deeper into his soul.

  The cycle slowly built back up, the strength flowing through him once more, and then he pushed again.

  Tyler grunted with the effort, but he managed to sit up. This was good. He grinned, feeling the mastery of his body as he gently slid himself against the wall. He faltered a half dozen times, but by the end of it he could at least prop himself up.

  Now was the real test, though.

  He dove back into himself, guiding his mana through the pattern with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to safety. This was his one hope — his one chance at survival. He needed to take advantage of it.

  The energy flooded through him, and he gripped the rough cave wall, steadying himself as he slowly set his good foot on the ground. Yes. Yes. Yes!

  Tyler straightened into a standing position, leg trembling from the effort as his muscles screamed at him with exertion. He whooped, the exhilaration coursing through him in a giant wave.

  “I did it!”

  And then he let out a breath as his concentration snapped. His body tumbled back into a heap onto the floor, but he whooped all the same.

  He'd done it. He'd actually done it.

  He was wounded, he was terrified, and he didn’t have a clue how he was going to survive to see the end of the week.

  But he’d survived the night.

  And as he gasped on the floor of the cave, bathed in the faint glow of dragonfire embers, he couldn’t help but laugh. It was a deep, breathy thing that came from his stomach, and with each second the sounds grew, until his howls reverberated across the cave walls and cut deep into the night.

  He’d proven that he could go up against the terrors of this new world. The Dimensional Storm had thrown its all at him, and he’d weathered it. The same as how he’d weathered the pain, the same as how he would weather everything the goddamn world threw at him.