15th of Season of Earth, 58th year of the 32nd cycle

  Newt, along with his fellow core disciples and four hundred and seventy-odd inner disciples, entered the secluded realm. The fine vapor misted, blocking his vision. while the thundering noise assaulted his ears. There was no danger, however, and as instructed by the venerable, he followed the waterfall’s roar.

  Soon the droplets filling the air grew from motes of fog into real drops, spraying Newt’s face. The noise grew even louder, reverberating in his bones, and a vertical river slamming onto a massive slab of white rock appeared before Newt.

  The first test was to sit beneath the waterfall. Dead at the center. Reaching the destination demanded strength and fortitude. Granite crust would have brought Newt straight to his goal, but the use of abilities other than physical bodies was prohibited. Worse, the challenge’s difficulty increased with the power of the body, not the testee’s realm.

  For most people, that made little difference. For Newt, it meant he would have to pass a trial for the fourth realmers while still at the third realm. He expected some sort of special exemption, but the venerable in charge of the Chamber of Instruction singled him out, stated he would get a more difficult trial, and that he would lose his next opportunity, should he fail to pass in the top ten percent.

  He clenched his fists and stepped onto the soft, white slope. The frigid water bit his flesh, waves more solid than ice struck Newt’s body, so cold he clenched his teeth to kill a high-pitched scream.

  At first the water was only as hard as ice, then the pressure increased, and Newt felt like he did when he climbed the tower, rocks falling on his head, but there was no respite. The rockfall oppressed him, pushed him back down the slope, but Newt took another step, then another.

  The gentle incline he climbed peaked, and became a miniature plateau fit for one. Newt sat, fighting not to sprawl on the ground as the water kept beating him without mercy.

  The second part of the trial was for the disciples to enter their realms under the assault. Newt failed to understand why that would be a challenge when the venerable explained the terms, but remained weary. He closed his eyes, and as expected, he was inside his realm, facing no difficulty while submerging his consciousness into his realm, but then paused.

  He stared at the realm. The heat and the red clouds were gone. Lightning danced in the dark skies while thunder echoed the torrential waterfall. Newt turned around and looked uphill, wondering whether his mind had strayed, but the volcano was there, as was the forest of Magmin Pines towards the peak. The familiar streams of lava flowed down the mountainside, shining bright in the sudden gloom, while the runic arrays flickered, the phenomenon conflicting with their usual steady light.

  Newt’s entire realm held its breath. Then the sky broke. A merciless wind blew from beyond the heavens, whistling, and stoking the fires of Newt’s realm, feeding and strengthening them. The completed spell formations blazed, fueled by the sudden surge of energy while rock cracked from the wind and the heat.

  Newt focused on defensive fire-attributed spell formations scattered about, trying to cover his realm. They burned and dissipated the heat, making it manageable and allowing Newt to shift to earthen barriers. Such spell formations were much more numerous, and nebulas of black, yellow, and brown rose to intercept the cutting gale.

  Newt had spent an entire season and then some cultivating his realm inside the best cultivation chambers the sect had to offer. Dandelion had been true to his word, hardly changing any of the existing spell formations, so Newt had made fewer corrections than he had expected, but even with all the advantages, his realm was less than five percent complete.

  The wind of desolation struck and cut, ravaging Newt’s volcano. Faced with the grim reality of it, Newt abandoned the uncultivated patch, and focused on the small area he had spent moons sculpting.

  Rock shattered beyond the safety of the consolidated defenses. The world was breaking, and Newt did not dare imagine what sort of damage his realm was taking.

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  “This is madness,” he shouted, focusing all his attention on commanding the spell formations. “My realm will shatter!”

  He wanted to keep shouting, there was nothing else he could do, as even venting became a distraction. Newt focused, resisted, and the wind grew hot. The earthen defense melted, and Newt realized the element smiting him was no longer air. He focused on the flaming shields, which boosted his defense against heat and cold, letting the solid cloud of earth fall to the ground.

  Just like whenever he suffered fiery attacks in reality, the heat assailing Newt burned, harmlessly dissipated, but it kept growing in intensity. Sweat ran down Newt’s avatar, wetting the surrounding rock before evaporating. Newt was stuck inside an inferno, the conflagration consuming his whole realm, burning everything in its wake.

  The ground sizzled, and Newt thought the test of fire would never end, when a fiery meteor slammed against his volcano. A crater bloomed at the periphery, and ground shook beneath Newt’s feet. He frantically re-summoned the clouds of earth, a sliver of his consciousness noticing that they were stronger and thicker, fed and refined by fire and ash. He would have been overjoyed if not for the meteors hammering at his defense.

  The world heaved, gigantic rocks jumping and bouncing like balls, and Newt realized he was down on the ground, dazed by the mental impacts of countless tons of stone showering his realm. The fire had disappeared at some point, Newt knew not when, so he dismissed that portion of his defenses once more, but the rocks kept hammering without mercy.

  The falling earth became lighter, dealing less damage, but killing fire more effectively. The heavens rained mud on Newt’s world, it might have lasted a minute or an eternity, but then the mud became rain, which became a pressurized torrent, just like the waterfall Newt had climbed to enter the hell he was in.

  The catastrophic deluge disintegrated rock, surges of water galloped down the volcano, slamming into the rivers of lava, turning to steam and extinguishing them, but the torrent caught the steam and returned it back for another assault on Newt.

  Water turned to boulders of ice, then sleet as wind picked up and rain let up. Newt was already delirious, frantically fighting to preserve the runic arrays he had made. He had already abandoned weeks of work as water drowned the least important of the fire-attributed spell formations.

  He was panting, then the water evaporated completely, probably carried by the wind into some other unfortunate’s domain. Wind picked up, blowing life into the dying embers of fire, and Newt’s fiery seals lit up once more, blazing with light, but the mountain’s abused, black granite was shattering into fine sand.

  Then fire came, its heat melting the world. The cycle repeated and repeated and repeated. Newt’s mind was stretched to the point of collapse, when the final fiery storm grew gentler. No meteors appeared to beat his realm, and as the conflagration died, Newt passed out.

  He did not know how long he had been sleeping, but when he opened his eyes Newt found himself sprawled on the grass, near a bubbling brook. There was no lavender-scented blanket, there was no sun, only stars in the sky and a huge, brilliant half-moon.

  Newt breathed in the scents of a jungle at night and enjoyed the sight above him. The elders overseeing the trial certainly knew he was awake, but left him alone as he stared at the heavens.

  The calm moment soothed his mind, but then unease crept in. What had happened to his realm?

  Newt closed his eyes and appeared at the base of his realm-volcano. He expected signs of devastation, of a cataclysm survived, but his realm seemed normal. Seemed was the key word.

  The ground no longer had the faintly wavy texture of cooling lava, it was straight and smooth as glass. Newt tapped it with his finger, and the touch told him it was just as tough as it was before, if not tougher.

  “Definitely tougher.” He took a slow, cautious step forward, ready to brace himself in case he fell, but the smooth surface was not slippery. Not for his avatar.

  Newt headed up, towards the sigils, but dared not sprint just yet. He was looking around, twisting and observing for any trace of damage, but he found none.

  The imperfections appeared when he reached the first spell formation. Whatever had happened during the trial has straightened some of the curves, made the surface more even, but that was not what Newt wanted. Failure to follow the most perfect runic forms resulted in waste and drop in spell formation’s performance.

  Newt fixed the distortion he had found, noting that he would have to check every single spell formation he had scribed inside his realm and continued his ascent. Magmin Pines still stood in the distance as Newt entered his second realm.

  He sighed in relief. The second realm remained unchanged. The ground kept the pattern and texture of igneous rock, rather than volcanic glass. Cultivators could not retroactively change their past realms, and he was glad the tempering he had suffered could not either. Had it damaged his realm, Newt would have had no way to set things right.