Pandora Unchained - a Cultivation Progression Fantasy

A darkness deeper than the shadows of Delphi Catacombs emerged from Sorin's corrupted divine crystal and entered his body despite Nemesis's protection. The Soul Bound Treasure screamed in alarm at the foreign substance. It was an enemy, and coexistence was impossible.

Even more telling was the cooperation between the divinity and the corruption inside the corrupted divine crystal. Both opposing forces agreed that this tainted presence had to be destroyed.

Unfortunately, none of Sorin's companions seemed to notice his predicament. "You know, this is a pretty silly medium for an inheritance, isn't it?" said Lawrence, tossing a ball of multicolored yarn up and down like a common trinket. "Shouldn't a divine cultivation art and all these techniques be passed on through a book?"

Turn your eyes. Look at me. If you look, it'll become obvious that I'm in a terrible predicament.

Unfortunately, no one so much as glanced at Sorin, leaving him no choice but to marshal the poison and corruption inside his body to fight off the invading force. Various toxic combinations threw themselves at the substance in a desperate attempt to identify its weaknesses.

"What are you doing?" groaned Stephan as Lawrence pulled out two sharp needles and started fiddling with the thread.

"Knitting," said Lawrence. "It's clear that whoever made this inheritance was great at working with thread. Who knows, maybe I'll manage to impress the original creator?"

"Since the creator was clearly a deity, I'm sure they've already seen through your disgusting nature," said Daphne. "Astley, would you happen to know who this Ariadne is?"

Astley opened her grimoire to review some notes. "Ariadne, a lesser deity. Alias: Pathfinder. Mistress of Webs. Known for guiding heroes through obstacles like mazes."

"Hey, that reminds me of that ball of yarn we found in Daedalus' Labyrinth," said Lawrence, taking out a small silver bundle.

"I thought we sold that," interrupted Gareth.

"I may have changed my mind and liberated the thread at a later time," coughed Lawrence. "The thread was pretty hard to break, so I thought it would be useful for certain activities."

"Oh yes, please, brag about your non-existent adult life," said Gareth, rolling his eyes.

"Hey, it's best to be prepared," said Lawrence. "When there's a will, there's a way. Also—hurk!" The ball of seven-colored thread suddenly devoured the silver ball and tangled with Lawrence in a very awkward manner.

"Do you need a hand?" asked Stephan, not bothering to get up.

"Nope!" said Lawrence, struggling with the seven-colored yarn. "I've got this. I'm a practiced hand."

"Watching doesn't count, I'm afraid," said Daphne with a bemused expression. "My bet's on him staying tangled up until it's time to leave. Any takers?"

Lawrence's antics extinguished any hopes that Sorin's companions would notice his plight. Even Lorimer had pulled out some snacks to watch the show.

If I'm on my own, I'm on my own, thought Sorin. This foreign substance is unlike anything I've ever seen. Its properties can't be analyzed by conventional means. The flesh of my right hand is undergoing simultaneous necrosis and large-scale breakdown. Bone integrity is at risk. Amputation is no longer possible as the substance is blood-transmissible and has infected 70 percent of my body.

Despite how terrible the situation looked, Sorin maintained his calm and professional demeanor. Mindless aggression was useful in fights but usually lost out in wars. And Sorin was under no illusions—this was a war, and his body was the battlefield.

"Lawrence, you never told us how flexible you were," Astley hooted. "Hey, is anyone recording this? It would make for great blackmail material."

"Don't you guys dare!" screamed Lawrence as his arm was pulled behind his back at an awkward angle.

Test 105: Mixed hemotoxin based on vampiric tiger lily harmonized with black adder venom, failure.

Test 106…

Test 107…

Test 108…

A battery of tests confirmed Sorin's initial assumption: his poisons were simply too weak to fight back against this strange substance.

That said, divinity and corruption were clearly capable of restraining whatever this aggressive substance was. Sorin knew this because the corrupted divine crystals had been stable before he'd tampered with them and tipped the balance.

My poisons aren't effective in themselves, but the divinity in my mana is able to resist the mysterious substance. Interactive behavior is similar to territorial poisonous interactions of the third conflicting type.

Potential solutions:

Improve poisons.

Absorb a divine crystal and manipulate foreign energy.

Introduce another conflicting poison and take advantage of the conflict.

Improving his own poisons on the fly was extremely difficult considering his recent struggles, and he'd already offered up his divine crystals to Lord Hope. In terms of powerful poisons, I possess two external poisons that I can use. The first is the Divine Bone Rot I held back after overcoming Asclepius's trial. This poison is weak, however, and in dire need of nurturing.

This left the three drops of Achlys's Tears awarded by his clan for his services in Delphi. Achlys's tears were a divine poison known to be corrosive enough to destroy divinity. Analyzing this poison is likely impossible due to its potency, but perhaps I can offer it to the strange substance to buy myself time?

The risk was high, but Sorin currently had no other options. He activated the bracelet and forced a droplet of Achlys's tears into his body. As predicted, it eroded whatever tarnished divinity it came into contact with. Achlys's tears were a spiteful poison that wasn't good at obeying orders.

Fortunately, this spiteful attitude made it a very aggressive and territorial poison. No sooner had it entered Sorin's bloodstream did the poison recognize the greatest threat to its existence: the foreign substance invading Sorin's body. It immediately halted its attacks on Sorin and redirected its efforts to fight this new enemy.

The clash between Achlys's tears and the foreign substance rampaged through his body, devastating his internal organs. With divinity and corruption on one side and Achlys's tears on the other, the substance had nowhere to go. It could only fight with everything it had against the weaker of the two options, Achlys's Tears.

Situation is sub-optimal. Odds of survival if situation is not resolved is low. Potential solutions:

Attempt to consume the retreating Achlys's Tears with toxic metabolism to try and force an evolution in hundred-poison acitoxin. Odds of success: unknown.

Collaborate with Achlys's tears to attack the invading substance. Complications anticipated. Achlys's Tears are not subordinate poisons and will likely attack once the threat is resolved.

Countless possibilities and threads of causality flashed before Sorin's eyes, but in the end, there was no clear solution. Either way, I'm on the losing end. But maybe… maybe there is a third possibility?

If Sorin had learned anything in the past year, it was that conflict and opportunity came hand in hand. Merchants maneuvered to obtain better deals and renegotiate existing agreements during wartime. It was the same for cities and factions.

It's the same for physicians. Some conditions are difficult to treat, but by introducing another harmful element, it's possible to fish in troubled waters and recruit 'helpers' from the original trouble-making substance. If a problem is too difficult to handle, introducing variance and change can potentially introduce a turning point.

Time was limited, so Sorin opted to try his hand at this third solution. He started by feeding Achlys's Tears a mixed stream of divinity and corruption, much like he'd done with the corrupted divine crystal. He simultaneously bolstered the poison and introduced corruption to its origins.

Sorin was not an enemy, after all. Sorin was an ally. Wasn't he helping Achlys's Tears fight whatever this hateful substance was? Also, Sorin had released the poison. How could he possibly be an enemy?

At the same time, Sorin used Violence to reinforce the notion that he was both an ally and an apex predator. He was the wielder of the Ten Thousand Poison Canon, after all, a natural ruler over all poisons.

The intense clash ravaged Sorin's innards, but thanks to Toxic Metabolism and his absurdly high regeneration abilities, his body held together. The foreign substance was quickly whittled down by the forces in Sorin's body and Achlys's tears.

It came as no surprise that these three allied forces prevailed. Unfortunately, the cooperation ended the minute their common enemy was no more. Divinity, corruption, and divine poison attacked each other with renewed vigor.

You can't fight if you're not proximate. Sorin tore away the corrupted divine crystal, which now no longer contained the foreign substance, removing Achlys's Tears' final enemy. The poison, no longer finding anything hateful in its vicinity, looked for a place to rest and recuperate. Most of its energy had been spent, but a powerful seed remained that could be nurtured with the right energies. Energies that Sorin provided via Grove Manipulator's Touch in the form of tarnished divinity.

With the threat of Achlys's Tears under control, Sorin turned his attention to the corrupted divine crystal. The object was vibrating loudly and had finally drawn the attention of Sorin's companions.

"Reee? Reee!" shouted Lorimer as he made a dash towards the violently pulsing crystal.

"Wait!" Sorin croaked. "Everything is fine. Stand back!"

Sorin snatched the humming crystal and snapped it in half using Hand of the Twisted Physician to pull apart the conflicting energies within it. The two halves of the crystal reformed to produce two new crystals. One was golden, and another was dark and filled with a large amount of unidentified corruption.

"Success!" said Sorin, grinning ear to ear.

"This is success?" asked Daphne dubiously. "You look like you were just mauled by a polar bear."

"During mating season," added Stephan. "What in Hope's name just happened?"

Not wanting to reveal the situation with his corruption, Sorin offered a simplified explanation: he'd used poison to fight poison and had eliminated the harmful substances present in the crystal before separating its corruption to produce a purified crystal.

"Daphne, you mentioned that the Temple of Hope charges for purification?" asked Sorin. "How steep of a fee do they charge?"

Daphne looked at the purified divine crystal thoughtfully. "It's not that they charge for purification, but that the process consumes a large portion of the crystal. Though it varies from crystal to crystal, you're typically left with something that's about a third smaller than what you have here. The corruption is also completely devoured during the process."

"So this is potentially profitable?" asked Sorin. At this point, money wasn't all that important. Instead, limited resources like divine crystals were. Clan merit systems all boiled down to divine crystals in the end, with the exception of demigod tier items that required special contributions to obtain.

"Can you replicate the process?" asked Daphne. "How often? How draining is it? How costly is it?"

Sorin took out another crystal and frowned as he inspected the energies inside it. The divinity and corruption inside the crystal were slightly different, but the harmful energy inside it was as overbearing as before.

"I'm not sure a hundred percent certain, but I think I can purify one crystal per day," said Sorin. "The poison I used just now is limited and needs time to regenerate."

"You'll have plenty of time to experiment in the future," said Gareth. "For now, I suggest you spend the next hour or so recuperating. Hopefully, this buffoon will be done antagonizing Ariadne's inheritance by then."

Sorin looked over at Lawrence with amusement, but his amusement soon turned to shock when he noticed that a golden energy was entering Lawrence. Startling changes were beginning to take place within his body, starting with his sealed Governing Vessel. Cracking sounds filled the air—cracking sounds that only Sorin seemed to be able to hear.

"Believe it or not, he's winning," said Sorin. I don't know how, but he is." The golden energy moved to his bones next and proceeded to shatter his silver seals to produce golden bones—golden bones that Sorin had only ever seen on himself and other God Seeds.

A chomping sound pulled Sorin's attention back to his trusty rat, who'd grabbed the crystalized corruption and had already bitten a piece off it. "Hey, you know the rule. No eating demon cores unless it's supervised and in a safe environment." He snatched the crystal before the rat could further upset the balance of corruption in his body.

Sorin then moved to stow the divine crystal, but a hand snatched it up. "This divine crystal hasn't undergone purification via normal means," said the owner of the hand, Gareth. "I'll need to double-check with the Nighthawks to make sure it's safe to cultivate with."

Sorin rolled his eyes. "It's fine. There's no corruption to speak of in that crystal."

"You literally told us the crystals from the Temple of Hope are poison," said Gareth. "So I think it would be a good idea to be extra cautious."

Sorin looked to Stephan and Daphne for support but discovered that they shared the same opinion. Even Astley was on Gareth's side. "It's not that I don't trust you, Sorin, but that what you're telling us is unprecedented," assured Astley. The only entity capable of purifying crystals is the Temple of Hope. This is a known fact."

Sorin frowned. "Are you concerned about how the Temple of Hope would respond if it knew I could do this?"

"I think it's a legitimate concern," said Daphne. "The Temple of Hope is basically a monopoly. It doesn't tolerate competition, even from small and meaningless religions."

"Surely they wouldn't interfere with my activities if they benefit humanity," said Sorin.

"Don't kid yourself," said Stephan. "Lord Hope is a greedy and insatiable lord that's only out for himself. If you disagree with me, maybe you should pay more attention during the next Wish-Fire Festival."