"This is the place," Rory muttered to himself. Pressing his palm against the nondescript wall, he closed his eyes for a moment.

Odd. I can tell that there are monsters beyond this point, but I can sense anything aside from that. It's as if my senses are being deliberately blocked.

That was potentially alarming, but it was also potentially a signal of rewards beyond what he had initially expected.

"Well, only one way to figure things out," Rory said.

Raising his pickaxe, he brought it crashing down against the wall as it shattered.

"Woah."

Staring out, Rory wasn't sure what to make of the sight before him. There he was, tunneling about in the lower portions of a volcano, and what did he find?

A winter wonderland. Or, some upside-down, twisty-turvy version of a winter wonderland. Towering pine trees stretched for miles, covered in snow.

Snow that was on fire, that is.

"Not quite what I was expecting," Rory said. "In fairness, it's hard to say what was appropriate to expect given I'm inside a volcano floating upside down over an endless black ocean."

He had broken in through a portion of the surrounding crater wall because, on second glance, it looked like a forest within a massive crater. Not sure what the best course of action was, Rory finally decided to go for it, taking a step forward through the opening and beginning to slide down the side of the wall.

Except, the instant he crossed the threshold, a display flickered to life in front of his very eyes.

"Trial of Frozen Flames and Burning Snow." Rory read out loud. "Trial?"

Rory had undergone a Trial before, the Trial of Space, on the second floor of the Maw. It was that trial that was primarily responsible for much of his advanced knowledge of all things space, including null spaces, real space, and any other form of space, as well as how the magic of this universe interacted with these spaces.

This was only his second time encountering a Trial. What was different this time was that there was no apparent need to enter through any magical means; apparently, simply breaking in through the wall was enough.

"Alright, so what are you going to hit me with?"

Dismissing the interface, Rory continued to slide down the crater until at last he reached the bottom. Not thinking anything of it, Rory took a step forward, his boot crunching onto the snow, only for him to jump back as if he had been shocked.

"The hell?" Rory yelled, taken off guard.

Curious, Rory tentatively pressed the tip of his boot into the snow, only to yank it back.

"Right. Burning Snow. It's in the name."

The instant his boot contacted the snow, it was as if he had attempted to dip his foot into liquid lava, something he had some familiarity with, given how much time he spent around magma nowadays.

Still curious, Rory glanced at a nearby fire that was crackling atop a snowbank. Shuffling along the edge of the crater wall, Rory drew closer before reaching out with his prosthetic hand. Passing his hand through the flame, Rory frowned.

"Cold. Freezing cold."

Tapping the back of his heel rapidly against the stone he stood barely perched against, Rory's mind raced.

Burning snow. Freezing cold fire. It could be some unusual or magical phenomenon at work. Or…. It could be an interpretation of concepts.

Due to his experience with runes -A given, as he was the founder of the art of runic inscription- Rory wasn't new to the idea of taking a concept and twisting it to fit a specific need. There were limits, of course, but something like the hot snow and cold fire could theoretically work if what was twisted was the element of temperature itself.

Still, it wasn't that simple. Sure, Rory could probably manifest snow or ice using a fire rune, but the ice wouldn't be hot; it would just be that the fire rune was used to affect the overall temperature negatively.

Looking at a tree, Rory's frown deepened.

"This is probably a terrible idea."

Not deterred, Rory mentally prepared himself before launching himself with all his might, kicking off from the crater wall as he latched onto a nearby tree. It was, thankfully, perfectly normal.

"Now what?"

It was a question that Rory pondered for several seconds before quickly scurrying his way up the tree, making it to the branches above. Pulling himself entirely atop one of the branches, Rory began to leap from tree to tree, avoiding the snow at all points. Continuing in this manner, minutes quickly passed into hours.

That's not strange at all.

Rory had become familiar with the feeling of time dilation; it was what he experienced every time he entered his Mind Palace. Even now, he could sense the flow of time altering and passing far faster than it ought to, with hours passing in minutes.

A clue, or just a part of the trial?

Uncertain, Rory continued onward, days quicky vanishing. It wasn't just time that seemed to bend and warp; space itself was in a constant state of expansion. The forest that had initially appeared as only a few miles across now spanned hundreds of miles.

It was only when Rory stopped that the compression of time halted, as did the expansion of space.

"Odd."

Odd was perhaps putting it lightly as Rory sat upon a branch, nothing but burning snow and freezing fire and regular old pine trees as far as the eye could see in any direction.

"I'm missing something."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

That much was evident as Rory frowned, head in his hands, thinking.

Not sure what to make of the situation, Rory decided to flip the script, changing directions entirely as he raised his palms upward. Concentrating for only a moment, a flame flickered to life above one of his palms as a globe of ice floated above the other.

Rory could feel heat flowing from the flame, and the ice exuded a chilled aura.

Alright, so it's not just that ice and fire are flipped.

"Fire is cold. The ice is hot. Space is expanding and time is compressing… Huh, when I say it out loud, it seems obvious."

Inversion. The answer was inversion. The Trial wasn't really about how hot or cold things were; it was about the state of inversion. Traveling forward should have compressed distance, as he covered ground, but instead it became further and further. Time, meanwhile, compressed the longer he spent here, increasing how long he spent here rather than decreasing as one would expect from the simple cause and effect that one would expect from requiring less time the longer you spent journeying to a destination.

Inversion wasn't a new force; he had tapped into it when processing neutral elements, inverting them into neutrally inverted variants. Up to down, left to right, right to left, and down to up, it was a concept he had considered in some limited fashion already.

But this was taking it to an entirely new level. It wasn't just the act of inverting a singular force or concept; it was the concept of inversion itself that seemed to permeate everything.

As if understanding had triggered something, Rory felt a fluctuation as things began to approach rapidly, the unmistakable feeling of monsters closing in on his location. Within moments, dozens of monsters appeared, all within the tier six range. It wasn't typically a group that would intimidate Rory now that he was tier seven, but something felt off.

Not able to put a finger to the feeling, Rory summoned his bow, a blood-red crystal arrow appearing.

I'll handle them all at once.

The arrow shot through the air in an instant, slamming into one of the monsters, a white ape with eight eyes.

Only to do nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

"Always a gimmick."

Rory wasn't ignorant enough to not catch on to the fact that his attack, doing absolutely no damage, had to do with the trial itself.

"If what this trial is really about is the concept of inversion…"

Bow vanishing into his inventory, Rory imagined himself drawing a lance forward from his Mind Palace. As the ghostly image of a lance appeared, rather than manifesting it physically as he usually did, Rory instead dispersed the Pneuma, like poking a hole into a balloon instead of filling it with air.

The lance vanished as Rory frowned once more.

Nope, not quite right.

It wasn't as simple as just 'doing the opposite,' from what he could tell based on the most recent attempt.

Time to investigate was cut short as the monsters began to make their moves, hurling magical attacks at him, icicles that burned and fires that froze the air itself.

"This is going to be a hassle, isn't it?" Rory sighed, preparing himself for the long haul.

Darting through the trees, a figure blurred as an ever-increasing pack of monsters followed, now numbering in the hundreds.

It was, of course, Rory. Months had passed, and still, he was trapped within the trial. The longer he ran, the more monsters began to appear, but no matter what he did, he couldn't seem to figure out how to kill the monsters. His every attack was rendered moot, inflicting zero damage whatsoever. Even a carefully planned Dragon's Fall had done nothing but ruffle a few snow piles.

So, Rory had switched to fleeing, his mind split into three. Two mental threads were fixated entirely on his escape, running from the monsters while also keeping track of his surroundings.

His third, meanwhile, was in a meditative state of sorts, closing off the rest of the world, as it did nothing but think.

The most obvious answer had been to utilize inverted concepts as attack methods, but it was easier said than done; the understanding of inversion was difficult to grasp, as preconceived notions invariably bled through.

And after months of thinking, Rory had finally felt as if he had an answer, a solution to his problem, the answer to the madness.

Three mental threads collapsing back into one, Rory finally stopped, turning to face the monsters.

"The answer was so simple," Rory said, smirking as he leaned back, falling backward off the branch he had been standing upon, spinning head over feet several times before slamming down feet first into the snow.

Brushing himself off, Rory rolled his shoulder, feeling good.

"Inverting concepts wasn't the answer, not at this level." Rory nodded to himself, the swarm of monsters encircling him, their prey behaving strangely. "Maybe at a higher tier, one can freely invert concepts, but that's not something you can just do nilly-willy, that's what I realized after enough time. So, how do you bypass the inversion-based immunity?"

Suddenly, Rory rushed forward, his fist glowing for an instant before making devastating contact with the lower jaw of one of the most common monsters, a white ape. The instant the uppercut connected, the monster was launched backward, flying through the air before slamming into a tree. Sagging over, the beast appeared to have had its neck snapped, instant death from the single devastating strike that it hadn't been prepared for.

"The purpose of this trial isn't to emulate inversion, it's to do the impossible, see the invisible, touch the untouchable, and break the unbreakable."

Banner appearing in hand, Rory held it to his side as he raised his left hand, gesturing once with a taunting motion to the ensemble of monsters.

What followed was a slaughter as hundreds of monsters threw themselves at Rory, only to be continuously cut down; all their prior immunity had vanished. As he fought, a gentle undulation, like a flickering haze of hot air, roiled off his body. Even his weapon, sometimes his banner, sometimes projected weapons, seemed to roil with that same invisible haze that bypassed the total immunity of the monsters.

Cackling, Rory released months of pent-up irritation. Without the protection provided by their intangibility from 'un-inverted' attacks, the monsters were weaker than their tier suggested.

Hours passed as Rory slaughtered the endless enraged monsters, until finally the last corpse fell to the ground, Rory drenched in blood.

"Not bad," Rory huffed, dropping to his ass on the previously magma-hot snow.

Tiers and ascensions were weird. One started as a fairly 'mundane' existence, at least as far as humans went. As the tiers were climbed and levels were gained, one would begin to gain access to powers and understandings of things like aura and pneuma manipulation, eventually culminating with the grasp of concepts themselves, almost more potent than the skills they were channeled through.

The importance of concepts was only reinforced over time, but what would happen if one encountered an existence that truly embodied the concept of intangibility? When concepts held power, held truth, and sway over reality, how could someone effectively combat such? If someone could manipulate the distance of space, an infinite, inviolable barrier that could never be pierced, how could one ever think of harming such a being or person?

The answer was relatively simple. It was just a sense of self. For as powerful as any one concept could be, no concept was more powerful than one's sense of self, a concept that was intimately interwoven down to the very DNA of a person, more innate than any other possible concept.

Sure, you could take a shortcut through a city to avoid traffic, or you could bypass it entirely, and that was what the embodiment of the sense of self represented, by channeling that innate 'concept' that stood atop the uppermost hierarchy of concepts simply from how intimately it was interwoven into a person's being, they could 'snuff' out opposing concepts.

Now, Rory wasn't delusional; he was reasonably sure it would lose effectiveness the stronger the foe you faced, but against similar-tier or weaker foes? No amount of 'cheating' concepts could deny the most innate concept of all, especially when imbued in every attack.

Or that was the lesson that Rory had learned. Technically, the trial may not have had any specific answer it was searching for; the embodiment of self was simply the one Rory had discovered.

Still clad in an aura of 'himself', Rory made his way to the center of the forest. Time no longer seemed to accelerate, nor did distance expand; snow was cold, and fire had returned to being hot.

After months of running, it felt odd to Rory to waltz his way to the center of the forest, but that's precisely what he did. Upon reaching the center, Rory took a moment as he put his hands on his hips.

There, a massive white ape, the size of a house, with four arms and twelve eyes, stared him down.

"Level seventy-five." Rory frowned as he dismissed the examine screen. "Great Ape of A hundred Throes. Edgy name."

The ape continued to stare him down.

"Let's just get this over with," Rory sighed as he readied his spear, mentally preparing himself for what was surely about to be a hard-pressed battle.

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