Monarchy Of the Sun, Pt. 2

Kane felt horrified approaching the temple.

"What the hell made a place like this?" He muttered to himself shakily.

Even though none of it was real, it felt real enough to him, the history of this temple and its secrets were paralyzing.

Waves of sickness washed over him simply from its existence, Kane had to put all he had into telling himself it was just a game.

He didn't know exactly what had happened here, but he wasn't sure he cared to find out.

With the deepest breath he could muster, he cautiously walked into what felt like his soon-to-be withered tomb.

The inside was musty... and empty, it was giving Kane chills.

He couldn't sense anything in the room he was entering, but he could hear the faint whispering of chants next to his ear.

'Only in a video game... I hope.'

Kane fumbled around, dragging his hand across the walls, looking for clues like the one in the cave.

All he could feel were muffled cries from below.

'Guess I need to be going down,' He chuckled.

Though Kane also considered going up to the higher floors to look for treasure, he decided he wanted to leave as soon as possible.

He passed by ancient carvings, statues, pottery, and seemingly dried-out corpses as he walked down the halls of the monument.

He could feel just the slightest breeze coming through a crack in the wall of the dead-end passage.

Kane decided if there was something in here with him, he didn't want to alert it with something like Black Hole, so instead, he teleported through the crack.

Kane whispered excitedly, "I didn't know I could do that!"

He was hit with another sensation.

A robed man sneaking through a large city at night, dagger in hand.

He was following a group of young girls, waiting. He didn't stab them though, instead using a plant-like spell to knock them unconscious, and drag them away.

"Well sh*t, someone call the Knights or something." Kane half-heartedly joked.

He had to keep reminding himself it was a video game, not real women getting kidnapped, but it was hard to say that when similar things happened just miles from his house.

He made his way down the stairs, a series of hallways stretched out before him.

Kane could hear more whispering.

'You will not survive the next if you do not learn what you need, pass through, child.'

"Pass through?" Ordinarily, he would just think the voices meant pass through some kind of trial, or the hallways... hell, ordinarily he would be concerned about hearing voices.

But after doing what he did with teleportation, he started thinking about how it works to begin with. Hearing 'pass through' somehow seemed like motivation to test the nature of the skill.

He sat down and calmed his mind, stretching out his senses, meditating.

This was his first time doing this in the game with his already heightened senses.

He began pondering just how the game allowed teleportation, did it move his character from point A to point B? Did it move point B to the character? Was it really instantaneous? Did he slip through some kind of...

'Pass through.' Kane thought to himself, coming up with an idea, he began concentrating on the space around him as he activated self-aport.

"Nothing." He moved too fast for him to understand anything that happened, and suddenly popping up in a new location was too jarring to simply catch his bearings and observe the moment he finished.

Kane thought for a moment. "Aport, maybe that would do it."

He picked up a rock, tossed it, and aported it. His senses fully attuned to everything happening.

Still nothing.

'If my skills are over space, then does that mean I'm moving objects through some kind of wormhole? Does it only affect what I want it to, or can I expand that space? If it's space, why do psychical things even matter?'

Trying something different, he set a second rock on top of the first, and only tried aporting the first rock. Success!

He'd be more excited if that weren't the obvious outcome.

He set the rocks back on top of each other and concentrated, letting his senses expand and focus on the rocks, feeling the mana flow through his body, he tried pushing just a little extra into his hand while he slowly activated aport.

Surprisingly, both rocks appeared.

"Yes! So space can be manipulated, I just need to consciously control the mana instead of letting the skill automate itself!"

He felt like he'd just broken down the game's magic mechanics into their base form, it was exciting.

Kane strengthened the output of mana flowing through his body, he never thought mana could be consumed without activating any skills, but he was apparently wrong.

It was a bit slow, but it was definitely draining him.

Kane stretched his senses out, his increased mana output was strengthening them greatly, he then focused on trying to detect the presence of whatever subspace his abilities made use of.

It seemed to work, Kane began picking up on every little detail of the room as if he was using some kind of scan.

Although Kane had no way of knowing, at the moment he was seeing.

It was in his head, and was more like a rudimentary black and white outline of everything than it was normal sight. But he could see.

But as previously mentioned, this wasn't normal sight.

Kane stretched these feelings out even further, letting them merge with the sensation of space being breached. His 'sight' began passing through physical objects as it became one with the space in the room itself.

He found that one of the hallways continued past its wall, he focused in on that spot. Using most of his concentration to keep his 'vision' in check, Kane teleported.

He teleported, through a wall, into a hallway he should have had no way of finding.

"Ha... haha, that worked! That was f*cking awesome!"

The game had an unfortunate profanity filter, but more importantly, Kane had made a huge breakthrough with his abilities outside of simply leveling up.

He walked over and began descending the flight of stairs at the end of the hallway.

His excitement was cut short as another vision entered his mind.

The shadowy man dragged the girls into an ancient temple, different from the one Kane was currently in, and slaughtered them on a large stone altar.

Although he was speaking a different language, Kane could still understand him.

"The flesh is no longer part of me, I am alive. Feed me the rain of the dead so I may grow, let me reach my once dead arms to the all-giving light, and cast my immortal shadow over the self-serving below."

As grotesque as the memory was, Kane couldn't help but shakily crack a joke, "The guy sacrificing people for immortality is calling everyone else self-serving, wonderful. You go do that man, you have my full support."

The ominous aura was getting worse the further down he went, but Kane had gotten used to the pressure.

As he continued down the stairs, he reached a massive room with a pressure plate in the middle. Hundreds of large squares spread out across the floor, circling the center of the room in rows.

Kane was washed over with another vision.

The shadowy man was in the temple praying. Grotesque plants growing out of his innards as blood pooled around him, the large dirt temple suddenly crumbled as a shockwave occurred. The man had died, leaving his disfigured corpse on the ground under a pile of dirt.

"These visions just keep getting more inter..."

'Marked one.' A soft voice whispered in Kane's ear.

'Sit on the stone square and expand, lest you die on the next.'

"Thanks players guide."

Kane was uneasy, but sat on the pressure plate anyways.

"Expand... expand, expand what? Could've been a little more descriptive."

He had a sneaking suspicion it was referring to what he'd learned in the other room, this whole place seemed to be a test.

He controlled his thoughts and feelings while reaching out. His 'scan' only seemed to expand to the first set of squares, he could see spiked pits below them.

"At least this one is straightforward."

It took everything Kane had just to maintain a small output of 1 mana every few seconds, he'd have to sharpen his concentration and control over mana until it reached the outer squares.

Kane tried focusing even deeper on the feelings of slipping into space, while this did expand his vision to the second set of squares, it wasn't enough.

Now he began concentrating on the flow of mana throughout his body, focusing on sending it to his most vital senses.

As the flow of mana gradually began shifting, Kane then put everything into increasing the output, bit by bit. Over the course of a few minutes, his output had risen from 1 mana every few seconds, to 1 mana every second.

He reached the third set of squares, but ran out of juice soon after.

"Damn, this is some tough stuff," He huffed.

After a few minutes of waiting for his mana to regen, Kane pondered what he could be doing differently, he had a breakthrough. While doing this exercise, he noticed the mana bunches up around his heart.

'What happens when you try to pull mana from unnecessary areas?' This was the best Kane could come up with for reaching the final set of squares.

His mana still wasn't fully charged up, but Kane began meditating anyways.

He felt the sensation of mana gently flow through his body, but it wasn't enough for him to figure out what he needed.

He increased the output, feeling it rush out from where it was bundled up. The mana was flowing more forcefully than before, but also traveling smoother, thanks to his practice.

He focused hard on reversing the feeling.

It worked, the mana from his arms and legs began traveling backward, up into his heart. He could sense his mana stat rising at around one per second, he gained maybe 20 mana total before he ran out of extra to drain.

This next part took absolutely all of his concentration, he began sending mana to his necessary senses while simultaneously pulling mana from unneeded places.

Rather than use this to make up for the mana he was losing, he did this to increase the concentration of mana that could go where he needed.

Focusing on slipping his 'sight' through the space around him, while concentrating all of his mana on his senses, he reached the fourth set of squares.

Finding the entrance, he withdrew all of his mana and sat down gasping.

"Phew, that's a lot of mental work." Kane groaned.

Making his way over to the left-most square on the outer row, he stood on it. The tile began slowly sinking as if it were an elevator.

He was now on the lowest floor. In front of him was a green coffin with a small box on top of it.

Kane's senses were wildly more powerful than before, but he still sensed nothing else in the temple.

Kane still wasn't strong enough to notice it standing there, staring as he approached the coffin.

Kneeling at the coffin, Kane felt the lock, expanding his senses did nothing as the inside of the coffin was somehow unobservable.

Using black hole on the lock didn't break it either. Kane let out a sigh and checked the box that was now on the ground thanks to black hole.

Yet another vision.

The shockwave he'd felt that destroyed the temple in his last vision was actually a massive solar flare. As its heat swept through the empire, it turned all plantlife ashen, killed everything standing in the open, quickly evaporated every body of water in sight, and turned the country to sand.

The sun was large, corrupt, unyielding, and almost sentient. A direct response to the will of the shadowy man's desire to transcend. Whether against his desire or in favor of, Kane had no clue.

He was shown generations pass as the surviving humans carved a temple, a home, out of the island in the center of the now mostly dried up eastern lake, the only place that still had any water.

The image then shifted to sparsely decorated humans digging through remnants of the dirt temple used for the sacrifices.

They found his buried corpse, cut it into pieces, put them in special jars adorned with diamonds and jewels, then buried them in the sand, taking a single piece with them to lock in a green coffin.

They also took the altar, which the green coffin was now resting on.

The key to the coffin was placed in a jar among his remains.

"Well that doesn't make much sense, why would they decorate the remains of the dude who destroyed their ancestor's country and ruined their lives? They clearly weren't too happy with it since they tried leaving, it's honestly kind of stupid that they didn't leave sooner, they were only a few miles away from the edge of the sand." Kane ranted at no one.

Kane's opinion on the writing team for this game had been greatly lowered.

The idea that they just decorated the remains of some random person was even less likely.

Kane knew where he had to go now.

-------------------------

He was waddling through the sand awkwardly, being pointed in the right direction by the weird guidance system.

The sun was extremely warm, it easy to see how this strange fake sun completely devastated an entire country.

Eventually coming to a stop, Kane reached out with his senses, he could feel the jars underground. All but one had been broken.

Pushing even harder, he began looking through their contents.

Finding the one with the key, Kane used Aport and watched it pop into his hand. The sand covering where the jar had been sunk down a little.

Kane walked back to the tomb with a satisfied smile.

Arriving back at the entrance, the pressure seemed to no longer bother him. In a weird way, aside from his mana control, his willpower had also gotten stronger.

Now knowing there were no dangerous secret bosses in the central and lower floors, Kane bolted through them, sparing no time to explore the extra areas as he went right back to the coffin.

"Let's crack this bad boy open!" Kane said while popping his knuckles, he was relieved he'd finally reached the last part of this quest.

Pushing the lid off the coffin, Kane was greeted with a skull and a bottle filled with black liquid.

Kane was disappointed, "Not... quite what I had in mind."

Touching the skull, he was hit with what he hoped was the final vision.

A religious man rising in popularity through the colonies, it was the man he saw lead everyone out of the desert!

Kane had been wondering about what happened to what seemed like the hero of these people.

"No creature has truly lived until it has died, only the sand will survive. Within its grains we will thrive." The very dark proposal was met with mass cheers.

The people had come to worship the massive sun over several generations.

'Yeah, never mind. Should've seen this coming,' Kane shook his head.

The man led masses of people out into the desert, not to search in the faint hope there was an exit, but to die in the sand and "thrive."

Just as Kane was leaving the vision, a large green hand grabbed his arm and forced him into another. "I had long succeeded in my quest, now you will see what fate awaited me."

It was the NPC from before.

Kane saw the shadowy man, he saw the sacrifices, he saw the praying and the loathing the man had for the world. He felt a sweet radiant light whispering in the man's head, spouting promises of immortality and power, a strange light that had connected the man to the temple and its altar.

He felt the shockwave as the temple crashed down around him. Then nothing.

A while later, voices could be heard, it was the people who'd dug up his remains and moved the altar over to this temple.

"We've found our king!" A thin man remarked.

The mass murderer was hailed as a king for causing the reign of their god.

His body was chopped into pieces, put in fancy jars, and left under the sun.

The consciousness of the man became one with Kane's for a moment, as he seemed to wake up under the sunlight despite being in pieces.

'When the sun swallowed the lands, I felt the light draining from the core of me. Here my remains lie vulnerable and pale. Unresponsive through absolute solitude from the light. The knowledge of the temple has begun coming back to me.'

Kane had no clue how much time passed between each slow and meticulous sentence.

'In silence my cells have begun to vibrate. My essence is retained, being fed by a semblance of rain. I must rejoice, the light once more calls my name.'

After a moment of silence, Kane could feel vague amounts of pain, as vines grew from the remains, breaking out of their jars and clumping together, hardening the sand into a green golem-like form as it all merged together. It spoke in a familiar dry voice.

"My remains, now strong and renewed, have come together through perpetual bloom, I thank the sun."

The visions ended, as Kane faced the now daunting vine-covered golem.

"Seeing as you keep going on about me surviving 'the next one,' I'll assume you don't want to sacrifice me or something..."

It didn't respond.

"So wh..."

"Drink from the vial, Marked One." The creature spoke slowly.

It had a look of calm on its face despite spending tens of thousands of years in a desert, yet its eyes were wide-open and shaking crazily as it stared. As if it would snap and brutally kill the first living thing it sees out of a twisted sense of loneliness.

Kane sniffed the vial and gagged. Reminding himself once more that this is just a video game, he took a sip.

A dull ache spread through his mind as the creature grabbed him yet again, "Now your mind will be detached enough to see it all."

The same visions ran through Kane's head, including a new one with a few unknown people pounding on an invisible barrier surrounding the desert.

Kane was a little relieved despite how terrifying the implications were, 'That explains why they didn't just walk 20 minutes east, I was worried they were really stupid.'

Now the view changed to a solemn, immortal green creature with a twisted face made of vines, walking through the blazing desert, past charred trees and petrified houses. Retracing what he used to know, over and over again. Trying to keep himself sane with memories of the life he used to despise.

He could no longer see the light he longed for, the sun had destroyed all connection to the light that initially led him to the altar. The sun was overpowering his view of the radiance he had fervently worshipped.

The glow of a torch would be drowned out in front of the sun's brilliance, he could only feel an empty haze within himself as he failed to find his light.

The creature despaired in sadness, slowly becoming more empty as the centuries passed. His goal was now to watch the world expire.

But something changed. Players began logging into the game, and a rot began spreading inside him.

He was finally nearing his freedom.

He could feel the presence of 15 marked people, but only two had what he needed, one had already gone too far and perished, but he could still save the other.

And so, he went out into the land, finding himself in a small cave as he awaited Kane.

The difficulty of the ability the boy had chosen put him behind their schedule. He would save the boy's life, the boy would save him. He had a dull understanding of this world's true secrets.

Kane was thrust out of the vision as the creature began speaking, "I have come to regret many things, young one, I want no more of this punishment. I wish to see it again."

Kane nodded, he knew exactly what it wanted.

After going through so many emotions and memories of pain and torment, his mental fortitude was far stronger than it had been prior to this quest.

He felt so much pain just experiencing small snippets of the creature's lifetime, and that was with his mind being numbed from the black drink.

"What do you need me to do?"

"Break the altar and drive the sun away."

Facing the altar, Kane used black hole. It didn't work.

"No child, remember what you have learned."

Kane focused, letting his mind slip into the subspace around him. He sucked mana out of his unnecessary passages and concentrated everything into his hand.

"Black Hole."

Consuming 200 points of his mana, a condensed black hole erupted from inside the altar, shredding apart the inside bit by bit as it raged on for nearly 10 seconds.

It split from the middle and fell apart.

The creature nodded, "Good, you will survive..."

As Kane turned around, he found the man had already collapsed in death.

Kane stretched his mana out, taking one last look at the man, who was now lying on the floor dead, an expression of relaxation on his face.

Despite the horrible things he had done, Kane still hoped the man would find his light, he had more than paid his price.

-------------------

Stepping outside, cool air rushed over him. The whispers, the pressure, and even the temple were all gone.

And so was the sun.