The Fifty-Fifth Step
Chris burned more wood-attribute mana, hungry for thrust. He felt the water mana flash to vapor in an instant. At this rate it would not be his hair that caught; his whole body might go up.
The heat can't be allowed to spread through me.
Send the strength to the legs, and the heat... the heat... the heat... where do I send the heat?
Heat was strength, and strength was heat. He could not think of them as two separate things.
If I want to live, I have to separate them. How?
First he drew the mana burning around his legs upward. There was something at the solar plexus he wanted to set alight.
A black bead that felt like stone.
That. Right there.
The moment he thought of burning it, mana rushed into the Black Sphere. Fire sheeted over it. Wood went up in flame and fed the fire still more strength, while every scrap of water mana fled toward his skin and kept his body from climbing past a tolerable heat.
What else do I need here?
Chris wished for a wind, and at once he felt wind-attribute mana.
So you're wind.
The wind mana was restless and free. It darted busily from here to there.
Come here.
He gathered it and sent it into the Black Sphere. Wind swelled the blaze. The flame rose savage and tore across the sphere.
Until now he had thought only of smashing the Black Spheres. It had never occurred to him to burn one like this.
Burn. Every last bit of you.
The fire raged harder, yet the sphere did not burn. What he felt instead was that it had gone soft.
If I can't burn it, I'll melt it.
His thinking had shifted from crushing it to powder, to burning it, and now to melting it.
Crush. Burn. Melt.
None of it was as easy as the words.
But do I really have to do them one at a time?
No.
All at once.
Mana struck the Black Sphere, lashed it, wrapped it, and blazed. The mana moving so directly was of three kinds: wood, fire, and wind.
Water-attribute mana guarded his body so his temperature would not rise. The rest — ordinary mana that bore no attribute, and the earth and metal he still could not tell apart — he sent down into his legs, where strength was gathering.
Even as he attacked the sphere at his solar plexus, Chris did not forget what he had come to do.
The fifty-fifth step.
I have to break that. And to break it, I have to take the fifty-fourth first.
Up.
His heart whispered again, and his feet moved.
From below, Alice shouted.
"He's going up!"
Catherine cried out.
"He's committed now. Finish it!"
By this point even envy had burned itself out. Andy, Howard, and Douglas no longer had it in them to resent Chris. The three of them muttered in a muddle of hollowness and cheer.
"Yeah. Go all the way."
"Show us what an attributeless Spirit Awakener can do."
"If it gets too hard, it's all right to quit."
There is something in the sight of a body hurled at an ordeal that catches at the heart. Peter and Carl cheered him on.
"I've never seen anyone complete it with my own eyes."
"Me neither."
David said, "None of us have, I'd wager. Most Seed Cultivation mages probably haven't either."
Of the four, only Harvey hoped Chris would fail.
Fall. Break a bone or two.
Better still if a broken bone punched through heart or lung.
William rubbed his hands together, his face sly.
"What if we caught that one and cut him open?"
Thomas clicked his tongue.
"That's a Grandmaster-grade body."
"Which is exactly why I want to."
"Too fine a thing to waste on a dissection. That flesh is on the level of a spirit treasure."
"He can't even use magic. He's not that far along."
Listening to the two of them, Randal thought, The Elder already wants him. Nothing's coming back to the likes of you.
Elder Perez murmured, "What attribute is that one, I wonder?"
To decide he carried a fire-attribute seed merely because his hair had caught fire was far too crude.
Cutting him open would be amusing, granted...
But that would be grasping at a trifle and letting the greater prize slip away.
Tom picked an interesting one.
"He has an eye for people."
A Seed Cultivation mage behind him asked, "What do you mean, Elder?"
Perez ignored the question this time as well, and gave no answer.
Alex said, "He won't complete it. He absolutely won't!"
Andrew countered, "The gravity is the same from the fifty-first step through the sixtieth. There's no reason he can't."
"He can't. He mustn't!"
As if to refute the words, Chris set his foot on the fifty-fourth step. Inwardly he cried out.
One step. Just one more step!
His solar plexus was on fire, and his legs hurt as if they might be crushed flat. Lay a leg across an anvil and bring down a mass of iron the size of a house, and it would feel like this.
"Huff... huff."
Chris fought his breathing back under control. Once the Black Sphere at his solar plexus had softened, the mana racing through him had quickened. He wrung out the strength that speed had given him and lifted a leg.
Thock.
His right foot found the step, and a moment later his left came down beside it.
I'm up!
Joy surged through him, and he clenched both fists. Then his brow knotted. He had endured the pain with the fifty-fifth step as his mark, and he had reached it. But that had never been the true purpose. The true purpose was to break the fifty-fifth step.
He tried to raise a foot for that last task and dragged in a breath that did him no good. Simply climbing a step and stomping one in order to shatter it were difficulties of entirely different orders.
Before the climb, he had pictured himself bouncing on the fifty-fifth, leaping high so that his weight and the acceleration of the drop would do the work. Add those, he had judged, and breaking the step would not be hard. He had stoked his resolve on that image, and now that he was actually here he could barely lift a leg, let alone jump.
Watching Chris raise a foot and set it down again where he stood, Alice tipped her head.
"What's he doing?"
Catherine could make no sense of it either.
"It looks like he's marching in place... Why is he doing that?"
Lai said, "I know."
The two women ignored the boy.
"I said I know."
Lai pressed the point again. They went on ignoring him, but Charles took an interest.
"And what is it you know?"
Lai was glad of the attention. He would have preferred the question from Catherine, but this would do.
"The excessive gravity has..."
He set a forefinger to his temple and went on.
"...done something to his brain."
"Hm. You think so?"
"I stuck a pin in a rhinoceros beetle's head once. After that it just spun in circles where it stood. The symptoms Chris is showing are exactly the same."
Charles clicked his tongue.
"And why were you sticking a pin in a bug?"
"For an experiment."
"What kind of experiment?"
"An experiment's an experiment. Why pick it apart?"
From the way he talked, he had tormented the insect for fun. And the more Charles thought about it, the experiment itself was the problem. Give that boy a few years and he would be running dangerous experiments on living people.
"Get a hold of yourself!"
Charles barked it and rapped the boy across the head. He had meant the knuckle-rap to be light, but that was not how it landed on Lai. The blow hit like a club, and Lai dropped unconscious, foam flecking his lips.
The Seed Cultivation mages settled on a shared opinion: something had gone wrong in Chris's brain.
Thomas said, "Leave him like that and he'll take serious damage to the brain."
William said, "Someone has to haul him out. Who's going up to get him?"
It was hard enough with magic. Enduring sixty-four times gravity with no magic at all was impossible.
Randal said, "The Elder could fish him out, I'd think."
Perez would only have to come down five steps. But he had no intention of fishing Chris out. He thought, So the fifty-fifth step really was the goal.
Some hundred and sixty years had passed since Tom was imprisoned.
A hundred and sixty years of wringing, and this is all it comes to?
Not quite disappointing. Not admirable, either.
Alex clapped, delighted.
"That bastard's lost it! He's completely cracked!"
Watching Chris climb, Andrew had taken him for a genius — a genius of the body, cut from cloth unlike his own. Seeing a genius of that kind come apart hurt.
"This is nothing to cheer about."
Cheer or not, Alex kept clapping.
Once he's ruined completely and worth less than dirt, I'll take him off their hands and torment him to my heart's content.
He let the fancy run. He was thoroughly pleased.
Chris kept driving his foot down. The Spirit Awakeners and mages below the stair and above it saw a man marching in place, but he was stomping. Feeble as it was, a stomp was still a stomp.
In his mind, a boom. In the world, a tap.
His heel beat the fifty-fifth step, and the shock shivered through his body.
Thud.
The vibrations kept stacking.
Thud.
Somewhere in the midst of it, the Black Sphere — softened considerably by now — gave a heavy slosh. In that instant joy seized Chris.
The Black Sphere moved.
It was a single flower opened in the middle of pain.
Again!
His heel struck the step.
Thud.
As the stomping went on, the height of his foot crept upward by the barest fraction. The only one who noticed was Elder Perez.
Thud.
Even so, the foot never rose past the ankle.
Thud.
It still hovered low.
Thud.
The stomp itself was nothing, but it had the aid of sixty-fourfold gravity. The same gravity that had tormented his body on the way up was an enormous help in breaking the step.
Thud.
Muscle raised to an abnormal pitch by Iron Body, cheered on by the strength of mana and assisted by gravity besides, struck the stair.
Thud.
Strike the step, and the reaction climbed his body. That became vibration, and the vibration kept shaking the Black Sphere.
Thud.
The flame was still tormenting it.
Thud.
It sloshed, and a single drop of the Black Sphere spat free.
Thud.
Strictly speaking, there was far too little of it to call a drop. To Chris it felt like a bucketful.
Thud.
The separated Black Sphere traveled the iron track — the path forged by Iron Body — down toward his left foot. His right heel kept hammering the step.
Thud.
That drop of black matter was hot as a live coal. As it descended it burned along the iron track. At first it hurt. Then it felt cool.
Thud.
Why does this feel cool?
Thud.
Chris turned his attention inward along the track and found that scraps of Black Sphere — scraps he had believed long since pulverized and discarded — still clung to the walls of the iron path.
Thud.
The drop of black matter burned through that residue as it passed. Look closer, and it was not only residue. The wastes of his body were burning too.
Thud.
One drop crossed the sole and seeped into his shoe. He was wearing shoes of thin cloth, the better to take in mana, so the black staining showed all too plainly.
Thud.
Another drop leapt from the Black Sphere at his solar plexus. He sent this one down the left leg as well. He had thought every scrap of residue and waste already burned away, yet some remained. The second drop burned what was left on its way to the sole.
Thud.
A third drop spat free.
Thud.
A fourth.
Thud.
A fifth. From then on, residue and waste no longer burned. All of it seemed to be gone.
Time to switch feet.
So he thought, and he tried to lift the left instead of the right.
Thud.
But at the sixth drop, something he had not expected happened. Residue and waste were gone, and yet something flowed out of bone and muscle and mixed itself into the black matter.
What in the world is this?
He poured every nerve into the leg and felt it changing at the root. His body was being rebuilt. In the midst of that, whatever interfered was riding the black matter flung from the Black Sphere and being driven out of him.
Thud.
There was more of the interfering matter than of the sphere's own substance, and it was brown. It did more than stain the shoe. It ran onto the step.
Alex jabbed a finger and shouted.
"Look there! Chris shit himself!"
Whatever had stained the step did look exactly like shit.
Andrew felt a surge of disgust, though it had nothing to do with Chris having shit himself. The disgust was for Alex, delighted at the sight.
"That isn't shit."
"Look closer. It ran down his pant cuff."