Chapter 4 – The Trial of Rings Begins
Narrator: Rui
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If you've never seen a sky whale, imagine a mountain made of clouds, lazily gliding across the horizon like it's got nowhere to be. Now imagine that mountain snoring and accidentally opening a portal to the Ring Plains. Yeah, that's how we arrived at the Trial Grounds.
Teleportation is dramatic like that.
Lei and I stood at the edge of a crater filled with floating islands, ancient ruins, and weird energy currents swirling like auroras on caffeine. Welcome to the Trial of Rings—a proving ground for reincarnated souls like us.
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The Rings Choose Again
There are five Prime Rings, and we're two of their bearers.
1. Echo (Lei) – Memories, emotions, echoes of the past. Soul-based.
2. Script (Me) – Storylines, causality, and altering "what should happen." Spiritual power.
3. Motion – Kinetic force, physics manipulation, speed. Physical power.
4. Law – Rules of reality, boundaries, contracts.
5. Time – Temporal folding, glimpses of future, loops, stasis.
Together, they form the Fractured Ring—the godlike power that once nearly broke the universe. That's why the Arcanon scattered them and why reincarnates like us keep being born.
But now? The Rings are calling us back.
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The Trialmaster Appears
From the center of the ruins, a sphere of compressed logic shimmered. Out of it stepped a humanoid wrapped in flowing geometric patterns—Trialmaster Quen.
"Ringbearers," he spoke without moving his mouth. "You have awakened too early, but the cycle accelerates. The Trial must begin."
More figures began to arrive—other reincarnates.
A girl with flames in her breath.
A masked boy radiating gravitational pull.
A blind monk with a glowing hourglass chained to his back.
Each carried a Ring. Each looked… familiar.
Like we'd known them in another life.
Quen raised his hand. "You will face five trials. Each ring shall test the opposite of its nature. Memory will be challenged by oblivion. Motion by stillness. Time by chaos. Law by anarchy. Script by truthlessness."
Lei whispered, "This isn't a game. They're trying to undo us."
I grinned. "Sounds like a Tuesday."
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Echoes and Scripts: First Test
Our first trial? The Mirror Tomb.
We had to enter a maze where the only way forward was by facing a version of ourselves we didn't want to become.
Lei encountered a shadowy version of himself—cold, manipulative, using Echo not to learn but to control others through their regrets. He almost couldn't leave.
Me? I faced a version of myself who rewrote fate to trap everyone in perfect stories. Predictable, sterile, fake. He smiled at me and said:
> "You fear chaos. So you overwrite it."
I laughed in his face.
Then I punched him.
(He vanished. It was symbolic. I think.)
We emerged from the maze exhausted, but alive.
Quen looked pleased. "Your threads remain unstable. Good. Stability breeds stagnation."
Seriously, who writes these mentors?
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Reincarnation Lore Unlock
That night, our rings pulsed. A joint memory opened between us—a shared past life.
We were born as twin princes in a crumbling realm, bearers of the complete Fractured Ring. When the realm fell, we shattered the ring ourselves to stop its madness.
Lei screamed in that memory. "Split it! Before it splits us!"
I cried as the power fled from us—across dimensions, into time, waiting to be reborn.
Now I understood:
This isn't just an adventure.
This is redemption.
We're not meant to conquer the world.
We're meant to save it from ourselves.
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What's Next?
Trial 2 approaches: The Still Citadel—where the Ring of Motion once shattered and froze time in a single city block for 10,000 years.
And we're walking right into it.