The darkness clung to me as I struggled to push my way out of the Repository. A hand closed around my arm, and I was tugged forward. Tender stood there, its green eyes sweeping over me. “You have returned. No longer are your roots barely clinging to the edge. Instead, they have taken the place of the earth that once nurtured them. You are still weak. Too weak. But at least you have a chance to complete the task,” Tender said, its hand reaching forward and brushing something off my shoulder. My eyes followed it, fibers from the exercise mat that I’d gotten on me when I’d retrieved the Fancy Club 3.0. Something I still held clutched in my hands. I’d assumed it was all an illusion. That I was fighting with phantoms of my mind. Instead… I turned back to the Repository. “What… is it?” “Whatever it is, is beyond my understanding. It is ancient beyond even our kind, its origins lost to the depths of history,” Tender replied, its voice unusually soft, even for it. “I know only that lost souls have a resonance with the Repository. That sometimes, those like you return.” I stood still, staring at the vault when I noticed the change. The crack that had run up it had vanished. Whatever I’d done, it seemed it had repaired the Repository. Or maybe it hadn’t been a crack in the Repository I’d seen. Maybe it had been showing me something else. Either way, I’d succeeded. I was one step closer. And all it had cost was… I pushed the memory of what I’d done to Perry down. “What sort of task do I need to complete?” Tender motioned me to follow, little forest-raptors running up to circle around us. Falling in, we walked to the nearby corner. Between the entrance to the Repository and the massive gates into the nearby underwater forests, the small door there was practically invisible. Didn’t help that it had the same stone and plant decor as the rest of the room, its seams hidden beneath several vines and no apparent handle. Vines the small forest-raptors happily tore free. It was so well disguised that even then, I didn’t notice it until after Tender pushed on it lightly, causing the door to pop free. “This will be a challenge, not because of your skills, but because of the pain you must endure. It is simple. Remove the clogs, restore the flow to optimum levels, and return alive. If you survive, your new roots shall develop into healthy flesh. Growth you’ll never achieve again. It may even prevent you from using my trials in the future,” Tender warned, its voice low as it laid a gentle hand upon my back. “However, should you succeed, you will have what you seek.” I nodded, staring at the door when a thought struck me. I hadn’t asked Conflict or Keeper, since I’d doubted either would answer, and if they had, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the details. But with Tender, I couldn’t stop myself. “You and your brothers. You’re all responsible for dealing with those who commit some terrible crime, aren’t you?” The being nodded, its eyes getting dimmer. “What is it you deal with, that’s so terrible?” “The most evil thing a good person can do, when they have the power to stop a horrific disaster,” Tender said, turning its head away from me gaze moving to stare out into the water above us. “Those in my grasp once served in the highest roles of Aeternia. They were meant to prevent the disaster when it came, to act in defense of the people.” Neither of us spoke. I watched the being, as it seemed to get lost in the past, only the flickering light letting me know it hadn’t frozen in place. Finally, it turned to me, the green light flaring once more. “What they did instead… was nothing. Worse than nothing.” Before I could ask for clarification, it held up its hands, stopping me. “You should go. While they may have done nothing to save their people, you know your path.” I nodded, rolling my shoulders. Then I stepped through the doorway. Immediately, the heat hit me. Downwards I went, along a set of stairs that felt older than the catacombs beneath Mount Aeternia. Every step, the heat increased until it felt like a physical barrier. Still, a simple heat Shield was more than enough to keep me safe. Water Breathing soon followed, keeping out the sulphuric air. Eventually, I reached a chamber that must’ve lain directly below Tender’s hall, filled with pipes thick as my torso. The second I stepped inside, the magic I’d used to protect myself was stripped away, drawn into one of the nearby pipes. Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on. It was just as bad as the area around the gazebo by the Golden Halls. While I’d been expecting something of the sort might happen, I still inhaled a partial breath of sulphuric air, burning my nostrils. Pulling out one of the many handkerchiefs Calbern had always insisted I keep on me, I tied it over my face before continuing deeper. How I was supposed to accomplish my goals wasn’t immediately apparent. I took a minute to investigate before retreating to the entrance to refresh my protections then heal myself. Was pretty sure Tender had expected me to simply poke around inside and endure it all. And I’d do that if I had to. No reason to surrender my main advantages before then. It took me nearly an hour to map the room. And in that time, I figured out several things. One, unclogging the pipes required turning massive valves with a specialty wrench. Two, there wasn’t any chance I was going to avoid being scalded when I did so. There was part of me that balked at the lack of safety standards. Yet I understood. They did have safety standards. It was totally safe for a certain level of superhuman. That’s why I was supposed to be at the third tier of physical. Even someone who didn’t specialize in Resilience would be able to walk inside and complete the task in a few minutes without getting so much as a rash. I just had the fatal flaw of being closer to mortal than the pedestrian third-tier maintenance workers they’d had working here. The third and last thing I’d discovered, was that there was a handy chart showing how to balance the flow after I’d unclogged the pipes. It seemed so easy I figured even the avatar of Perth I’d fought could’ve figured it out. That was gonna be a weird conversation to have with Nexxa. “Oh, yeah, I saw Perth again. He tried to kill me, again… So I killed him back, again…” I muttered into the empty room. Then I let out a long sigh. “Sorry I didn’t spend more time figuring out how to save your brother.” “And now I’m talking to myself,” I grumbled, shaking my head. Wasn’t looking forward to this next part. Still, I squared my shoulders and darted forward. I leapt upward, putting my full body weight behind pulling the wrench down. Just like that, the valve spun open, spewing its contents across the aisle. I was already gone, because there was no chance I was gonna stand under it as it dumped its gunk. Looping back around, I moved back to the entrance, waiting until the fluid leaking out ran clear. Then came the hard part. Getting it closed again. Once more, I ran out, though this time I used a second wrench I’d left to the side for the purpose. Sliding it into place, I set it on my shoulders then started to lift. It moved, but only barely. Read full story at 𝓷𝓸𝓿𝓮𝓵·𝓯𝓲𝓻𝓮·𝓷𝓮𝓽 Wheezing as the heat started to get to me, I continued pushing. Fluid splashed around my ankles, and the scalding pain made me lose my balance long enough for the wrench to slip, knocking me hard across the back. Barely catching it before it could slip into the fluid running past my ankles, I put it back in place then continued shutting the valve. After I was done, I limped back to the entrance as quickly as I could, which wasn’t very. I was moving slower than my first days on Ro’an. With a shaky breath, I leant against the side as I healed my injuries with Restore form. “New plan. Don’t get burnt,” I said, shaking my head. “Now… how to do that?” After a couple quick tests stepping in and out of the chamber, looking for materials, and utterly failing to find any, I sat on the stairs, staring blankly at the stone above me. I blinked a couple times, before chuckling softly. “That easy, huh?” Sure enough, I tested Sculpt Stone on the wall of the stairwell. Nice and sculptable. The rest of the valves were much easier. I put some nice buffer type barriers in place that kept the fluid from splashing in my direction, and even fashioned a pair of stone boots. Those turned out to be too awkward to use. I still picked up a few small burns on my hands, but they were easy to ignore long enough to clear the valve. Once I had all sixteen valves cleared, the temperature in the room started to drop. “Yeah, that figures,” I said, shaking my head before making my way over to the controls for balancing. Compared to the slog that had been getting the valves cleared, balancing the flows was simple. I’d seen puzzles on the back of cereal boxes that were more complicated. When everything was sorted, I found myself looking around the room in disbelief. Sure, it’d been annoying, but hardly close to what it’d taken to get through Conflict’s task. I’d had to learn entirely new ways of enchanting to complete the repairs to the mana-reactor. Making my way back to the stairs, I stopped, looking back inside the chamber. Nope, hadn’t missed anything. When I made it upstairs, I was expecting some sort of acknowledgment from Tender. Instead, it waved me along to another hidden door. Of course there was more than one chamber. The next one was mostly the same, though it was even warmer than the first. Still, my stone barrier did its job, and I did mine. There were two more chambers after that, each one getting warmer. The last one was so bad that even standing outside the room with my heat Shield active, I was sweating buckets. In the end, Tender had been right. Even with buckets of ice from Create Ice, each valve purge left me covered in nasty steam burns. Burns so bad I could barely limp back to the entrance, slump down and use my spells to bring me back to normal. And then get up and do it again. When I finished that chamber, I felt it. Not a change to my body, but to the halls themselves. A subtle vibration that rose before settling into nothing. I was halfway up the stairs, on my way back to Tender to find out if there was a fifth such chamber when my body simply collapsed. At first I thought it was everything I’d put it through. In a way, I was right. I’d gone through a similar process once before. With Tamrie, back when we’d advanced to the second tier. Hoped she was enjoying her goodbyes. Maybe I should’ve put this trial off, to share her last nights with her. Yet I didn’t have that luxury. Not when she was only staying as long as her pod was safe. It felt like it took a lot longer for my body to settle than it had the time before. Tender hadn’t known what to expect, since every person before me who’d tried what I’d done had died in the attempt, something the being had only revealed to me halfway through. What felt like a couple hours later, the feeling in my legs started to return. Half an hour after that, I was able to stand. It took me another half hour to climb the stairs. By the time I reached the top, I felt almost normal. “I am relieved to see you well,” Tender said when I emerged. The words slipped past, barely registering as my attention fixed on the lake behind and above it. It had been the middle of the night when I descended. Still, it hadn’t been nearly long enough for the sun to rise. So, why was the lake alive with light?