Ascendance: The Rebirth Of The Unknown Gamer

After Aura had collected all the resonant sandstone he could, he and Fiona began work on the grand project, setting up bases in all the best places.

They set up a return point at the Cliff of Howling Songs and a few other places, but most bases were connected via piano.

Bases could be infiltrated or stolen, but during the time they were setting everything up, Aura placed enough wards to be considered overkill around each base.

Aura also spent a fair bit of time musing about Fiona's replacement blood.

As previously mentioned, thunder and darkness aren't all that closely related in terms of attributes.

So since there wasn't a workable attribute, Aura began to look at domains.

In Ascendance, raw force is used in spells to generate an effect.

Each spell has either an attribute or a domain attached to it.

Attributes are simply the element that the spell modifies, creates or manipulates, whereas domains are less concrete.

Domains are based in the soul of things, and each individual has their own unique domain.

Most never learn to use it though.

When a spellcaster reaches the mastery over their casting, they can choose an element to specialize in, and as they continue to level their casting skills, they will find themselves mastering more niche versions of their own element, until it becomes entirely unique.

Domains, however, are souls, each domain capable of bypassing natural law to an extraordinary extent.

Everything has an innate attribute, but very few things have an innate domain.

However, there is a domain for every imaginable concept, and they can be modified to suit your needs, depending on how powerful your imagination is.

A fusion of thunder and darkness could be music, depending upon the user.

Fortunately, due to the flexibility of domains, so long as he didn't pick Fiona's natural opposite, it would work for her.

Unfortunately, while attributed blood is cheap and can be bought for coppers, domain blood is expensive.

Very, very, very, very, very expensive.

Only divine entities and the like have full control of their domains, and thus, only they have blood that contains their soul's power.

Blood like that may take a few hundred thousand gold.

Aura would have to use his knowledge of the future to the fullest extent and raise all the monies.

Good news is, there's an organization dedicated to the hunting down and retrieval of the divine.

If given enough money, and with enough contractual care taken, one can simply purchase a god's life.

There is a false god of music who could be killed and utilized for this experiment, and since this god is not of the fighting type, it would lower costs somewhat.

As for how to find your own domain, that's actually fairly easy.

When you complete a trial tower and ascend to the next realm, you must walk through a room filled with cards.

Within this room are billions of cards, and one of them is yours.

If you can track down and take the card that belongs to you, you can kickstart the process of learning your own domain.

Or you can spend a hundred in-game years meditating upon your inner truth.

There are all sorts of tricks to the shortcut method, but not so many to the meditation.

The first method is hard but quick, while the second is easy but long.

Aura knew his own domain, but wasn't exactly satisfied with it.

There was no way he was going to learn how to use domain spells with that kind of domain.

It's just a little too embarassing.

Fiona's domain was probably undecided, as she was too young and imm.a.t.u.r.e to have a definative worldview and casting preference.

By the time Aura had died, many players had learned domain spells, and they were powerful, but most had odd effects.

The best example was an advanced druid whose domain was leaves, and whose spells were basically creating leafy tornadoes and foliage that would block line of sight, before creating all sorts of nasty effects, like poison and explosions.

Domains are powerful but they make no sense.

Or at least, that's Aura's take on the matter, given how nonsensical domain spells can get.

Since domains rely on the imagination, so long as you can connect your domain to an effect, you can make it happen.

There was a notable case of a player whose domain turned out to be colors, which allowed him to create any effect that was colored.

He rose to the number 1 power ranking by unanimous vote from everyone.

Dude was just OP.