Stamina Tonic still sloshed in belt flasks and throat pouches, but bodies began to betray their owners anyway.
n and won hamred their own forearms with clenched fists as if pain might wake the muscles back up.
Fingers that had gripped stone since yesterday would not close all the way.
Shoulders refused to lift. It was not a weakness of will.
It was the old, ugly limit of mortal flesh.
By the third kiloter of Corpse Mountain, the mountain started sending its own answer back.
Undead goats picked their way along the cliff face where there should have been no holds at all.
Their hooves found purchase on nothing. Their bodies leaned into sheer rock as if it were flat ground.
Fire burned in their eye sockets, a steady orange glare, and their horns were too big for any sane animal, curled and scarred like old weapons.
When they noticed a climber, they charged from absurd distances, letting gravity turn their madness into speed.
Sotis they did not even need a human target. The goats slamd into each other with bone cracking force, horn on horn, body on body, the impact echoing through the rock.
Every clash sent a shiver through the line of participants.
Clouds crawled over the rock and swallowed distance, leaving only a few cruel details sharp while everything else beca vague lines and mirage shapes.
It left them no ti to sabotage one another. The mountain was doing enough killing on its own.
Raxutus learned that the hard way. He had co into this round smiling, thinking it would be a fighting test, steel armor snug and proud, the sort that made lesser n step aside.
That false assumption already taxed him with every pull and every breath.
And now heaven, or the mountain, seed eager to see how much will he had left to spend.
One goat hit him high on the torso and bent the breastplate at the wrong angle. The tal folded into him.
The sound was not loud. It was intimate. A pressure. A crush.
He coughed and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.
Still he refused to let go. Tears streaked down his face as he clung to the rock and shouted upward, voice cracking with panic and stubbornness.
"God Eldric. I can still proceed. Please don’t pull out of the competition."
He said, loud, because he had seen too many stories where the referee decided your fate before you could plead.
If Eldric pulled him out first, the plea ca too late.
Raxutus did not want rcy. He wanted a chance, even if the chance killed him.
Halfway to the third kiloter marker, the numbers had bled away.
One thousand three hundred had beco seven hundred, shaved down by the goats that seed to ho in on each struggling participants.
Above them, near the peak of Corpse Mountain, Eldric rested as if the mountain were a chair built for him.
When he spoke, his voice bood across the stone, yet it landed gentle enough not to startle a climber into letting go.
"This is the shortcoming of the mortal body," Eldric said. "Alas... I shall grant you all a respite."
A murmur moved through the cliff line like wind through reeds.
Relief tried to bloom, then Eldric continued and cut it into a sharper shape.
"Spend all your montum. Hold nothing back. Once the number of participants falls to five hundred, the winners shall be ranked from first to last by how far they have climbed."
Sothing lit inside the crowd. People who had been moving like ghosts suddenly found teeth again.
It was like watching a field of dying grass catch a spark. They surged, each one trying to steal distance before the count hit five hundred.
Breath tore. Fingers bled. Pride grew claws.
The ones who looked like they had planned for this were the obvious nas.
Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher regrouped after being scattered.
Youngbanners moved with his team of six around him, guards and hands, a small kingdom clinging to one man’s ambition.
Raxutus, even half broken, still fought for every grip, because he understood the rules of cultivators and the cruelty inside them.
None of them were the true danger.
Tabulae was.
She had read the Workman’s Body Strength Codex in the quiet ways a poor child read a book, as if every page were food.
Most manuals taught how to swell qi and throw it outward, how to make a show of power.
This codex held sothing else. The essence of working people.
The kind who lifted loads until their backs felt like fortresses.
The kind who climbed scaffolds and cliff faces with hands locked like vise grips, because a father wanted to bring sweets ho and could not afford to fall.
Sackmace, Lonequiver, and Reelfisher read those passages as simple stories, filler between techniques. Tabulae treated them like the spine of the manual.
With her ager understanding, Tabulae could still feel it.
The one who wrote the codex had been beyond gods, not because it was flashy, but because it was simple in the way truth was simple.
It did not chain a cultivator to fighting alone.
It cared about work. About finishing the work. About doing the job well, no matter what the job was.
The realization ran through her like cold water, and she shivered around the holds.
Tabulae’s arms looked dainty. Her shoulders did not announce strength. Still her body moved like a strong man’s body married to an acrobat’s balance.
Her qi did not flare out like a banner. It flowed through muscle and bone and tempered itself in each use, turning strain into shape.
She was almost bottod out of qi. That did not matter. Now was the mont to stop pretending she belonged in the bottom.
She climbed. The change in her was not dramatic to the eye. No aura storm. No sudden glow.
Only speed that did not match the hours already spent on stone.
It was like watching a house gecko skim up a wall, casual and relentless.
People noticed. Heads turned. Hands slipped from holds because eyes followed her instead of their own fingers.
Two undead goats took interest from above. Fire burned brighter in their empty sockets as they angled down the rock face.
They ran toward her on the cliff like gravity was a leash they had learned to bite through.
Tabulae did not slow. She climbed faster.
One goat flashed past close enough that its horn grazed her hair and tore a few strands free.
The stink of old bones hit her like a slap. She kept climbing, jaw clenched, nails burning.
The second goat waited, smarter in its madness.
It tracked her line until she was level with it, then charged sideways, horn aid to knock her loose and make her fall a long, long way.
Tabulae let it co. At the last heartbeat, she released her grip.
For an instant she fell.
Wind grabbed at her clothes. Her stomach rose into her throat.
Then her foot found what she had set beforehand, five cram bolts hamred into a narrow seam, a crude ladder of tal teeth.
Her sole hit. Her weight caught. Her hands snapped back to stone.
The goat did not have bolts.
It sailed past her and vanished into the clouds below, its burning eyes becoming two brief sparks swallowed by fog.
Tabulae did not look down. She could not afford the thought. She climbed.
She overtook contestants one after another. Faces twisted in shock as she passed. A few cursed her.
A few tried to match her pace and failed within ten breaths.
Even Sackmace and the others stared at her like they had misread the day.
Soon Tabulae saw the broad back of Raj above her.
Raj felt her, or so it seed, because his pace changed the mont she ca close.
He accelerated as if he had been saving that speed for the first real threat.
He climbed with a strange calm, eyes unfocused, body moving on instinct and touch.
Radeon had shut down the rest of his senses for this climb, leaving only one thread of feeling to guide him.
Tabulae did not care about anything else but the man’s back getting farther.
She had not counted bodies. She had not marked who had fallen and who had surged ahead. Her mind did not care about numbers.
Her perception only cared about distance, and it told her the sa cruel lie, that she was still behind, still only catching up to the true forerunners.
The thought tightened her throat until breathing felt like swallowing fire.
’No,’ she told herself. ’Not after all that work. I don’t want to see those dumb miners anymore.’
She bared her teeth and roared, young voice turning raw against the rock.
Raj glanced back once. Surprise flickered across his face, then hardened into sothing stern. He climbed harder.
Tabulae climbed harder too. Together they reached the fourth level.
The mountain changed its ga again.
Crows ca first, a black swarm slicing through mist. They did not circle like normal birds. They flew straight at faces.
They pecked at ears and eyes, at anything that could make a climber flinch and lose a hold.
They had one purpose and it was not death. It was falling.
Raj entered first. Tabulae ca behind him, close enough that the crows chose them as their best sport.
Raj’s body took it like a nuisance. His fra, the Asura’s gift, barely reacted.
Beaks struck and skittered. Claws scraped. He did not even slow.
Tabulae did not have that kind of body.
Twelve birds hit her at once, because her face was the one part not covered. Beaks punched skin.
Talons raked her cheeks. A sharp beak tore at the rim of her ear and blood ward the side of her neck.
One pecked at her eyelid hard enough that her vision burst white for a blink.
She bit down on the spirit stones in her mouth, three of them, pressing her tongue against their hard edges as if she could drink power through her teeth.
Her hands did not let go. Her breath ca fast and tight.
She reached for her ridians and rotated her cultivation.
Not down to the abdon. Not into the safe, familiar pool.
She pushed qi up into the channels of her throat and neck, then forced it into the ridians in her head.
The load was too big for a new Breath Tempering body.
Her ridians protested. Pain sparked behind her eyes.
It felt like tearing, like her flesh wanted to split to make room for the flow.
She forced it anyway. A crude barrier ford around her face, nothing elegant, more like a misshapen buckler.
Beaks struck it and skidded off. The crows shrieked in frustration and beat their wings harder.
On the stage far below, cultivators watching the climb began to murmur, interest sharpening.
"That young lass is truly gifted," one voice said. "Look, she’s raised a rough qi-barrier, and she’s only just brushed cultivation."
"Do you reckon God Eldric will let her slip away?" another asked, hungry in his tone. "I’d take her for my disciple, I would."
"Keep on dreaming. Think God Eldric’s blind, do you? Or that he’s got dog’s eyes and won’t take in a talent like that?"
Tabulae did not hear them. She heard only her own breath, the scrape of stone under her fingers, and the thud of wings hitting the barrier like fists on a door.
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