"Alright, folks," John said, standing in the middle of the first island with the whole family gathered around him. "We’re taking a break from the outside world for fifteen days. Two objectives. Two side quests."
"First objective, all of us push to at least Calamity-5. With my resources and daily training, we should manage roughly one stage every two days."
"Second objective is mine alone. I’m going to figure out how to safely turn the three of you into something like me."
Yuna, Azelis, and Jibril traded a look that wasn’t quite surprise, more a question none of them said out loud yet.
"Explain the stage-climbing part first," Azelis said. "How does this actually work?"
Chuthulos floated forward, small hands folding together. "Each Calamity stage has a hard ceiling. Stats, Calamity Core, both cap out eventually no matter how much you train. Once you genuinely hit that ceiling, not just touch it but live inside it through real combat, the world’s own law notices. It sends a Tribulation."
"A test?" Jibril asked.
"A storm," Chuthulos said. "Condensed stage-appropriate energy, falling from the sky in waves that get worse the longer you survive it. You don’t dodge a Tribulation. You absorb it, convert it, and let it carry you into the next stage. Fail badly enough, and it simply throws you back down."
"So we train until we max out, then get struck by lightning," Yuna said. "Great. Wonderful. Very safe."
"Extremely unsafe," Chuthulos said cheerfully. "But survivable, with the resources we have now."
...
Alfred triggered the first Tribulation before lunch on the second day, having spent the morning sparring against Terravax until his stats stopped climbing entirely.
The sky above the first island split open without warning. A column of dense, crimson-black lightning tore down toward him and struck his raised claws with a force that cracked the ground beneath his paws.
He didn’t flinch. He opened his jaws instead and swallowed the second bolt whole, letting it burn through him rather than around him.
By the fifth strike, gold-black light had started bleeding from his own fur to meet the lightning halfway. By the ninth, the storm broke apart entirely, dissolving into harmless motes of drifting light.
[Alfred: Ruinmaw Tyrant of the Black Stars] [Rank: Calamity, Second Stage] [Strength: 30,000 | Defense: 30,000 | Speed: 30,000] [Calamity Core: 65,000 / 65,000]
"That’s one," Alfred said, shaking out his fur like he’d just survived a rainstorm rather than the wrath of the world’s own law.
...
The days settled into a rhythm after that. Mornings meant sparring, hard enough that even Terravax occasionally admitted to being tired. Afternoons meant whoever was closest to their ceiling stepping into the open field everyone had started calling the Storm Yard. Evenings meant recovery, food, and the particular quiet that came after watching someone you loved survive something that could have killed them.
Levi’s Tribulation on the third day turned into the strangest one yet, void-threads catching each bolt mid-fall and simply redirecting it sideways into the ground instead of absorbing it directly. Nobody was entirely sure that counted as passing the trial fairly, but the storm broke apart regardless.
’I never claimed to fight fair,’ she said afterward, entirely unrepentant.
Vhastra’s storm came the same afternoon, crystalline claws catching each strike and letting it shatter harmlessly against her own hardened body, patient and unbothered the way only something centuries old could manage to be.
Jibril’s second Tribulation came on the fourth day, violet-black lightning meeting Chronoshard Fang’s stored strikes head-on. Each bolt she absorbed fed directly into the blade, and she finally released the whole cascade back into the storm itself, shattering it from the inside.
[Jibril] [Rank: Calamity, Third Stage] [Strength: 40,000 | Defense: 40,000 | Speed: 40,000] [Calamity Core: 70,000 / 70,000]
Azelis took hers in near-total silence, Shadow Ink swallowing each strike whole before it ever touched her. Vhastra weathered her own second storm right beside her, and neither of them made a single sound of complaint.
Yuna’s storm turned into an argument halfway through, Emberlune splitting the incoming lightning into a dozen smaller, more manageable bolts through pure illusion trickery. That technically wasn’t allowed, and nobody stopped her from doing it anyway.
"That’s cheating," Chuthulos said, watching with obvious delight.
"It’s not cheating if the storm can’t tell the difference," Yuna shot back, grinning through the strain.
Kaelstrom’s turn came quietly the next morning, six eyes fixed unblinking on the sky the whole time. He took every strike standing perfectly still beside Terravax, as if proximity to the older Monster’s calm might somehow lend him some of it.
...
By the sixth day, the whole family had climbed to at least Calamity-3. The Storm Yard had developed the particular scorched, cratered look of a place that had earned its name honestly.
Terravax’s Tribulation became something of a local legend, mostly because he simply stood there and let every strike hit his shell directly. He refused to move even once, until the storm itself seemed to grow almost frustrated with him.
"I don’t dodge," he said afterward, entirely unbothered. "Dodging is for people without a shell."
Rexion’s storm turned into an accidental fireworks display that Pymon narrated from above with theatrical enthusiasm, and Noctelith’s Tribulation folded in on itself so quietly that half the group nearly missed it happening at all.
...
While the Storm Yard filled with lightning and laughter in equal measure, John spent his own hours somewhere quieter, buried in the Rune of New Beginning with Chuthulos beside him, chasing the same problem from a dozen different angles.
The first three attempts failed before they even reached a testable stage, theoretical constructs collapsing the moment he tried to model a human soul absorbing raw Eldritch attribute directly. By the fourth night, he’d started talking to himself just to keep the frustration from curdling into something worse.
"The issue’s never been power," he said, on the fifth night, rubbing his eyes. "It’s architecture. My own soul was built from scratch around the Eldritch attribute. Theirs weren’t. Forcing the same structure onto an existing soul is like rebuilding a house’s foundation with the family still living inside it."
Chuthulos drifted close, quiet for once. "So don’t rebuild it, brother John. What if you didn’t force the structure at all. What if you planted it instead."
John went very still. "A seed."
"A seed," Chuthulos agreed. "Small. Dormant. Something that grows into the soul’s own architecture over time, at whatever pace the soul can actually handle, instead of overwriting it in a single violent motion."
They spent the sixth day building the model properly, testing it against a dozen simulated failure states before either of them trusted it enough to call it real. John didn’t sleep that night at all. By dawn on the seventh day, he finally had it, a working model small enough to test safely and gentle enough to trust.
He found the three of them together near the lake, still faintly scorched from the previous day’s Tribulations, and the words came out steadier than he expected.
"I figured it out," he said. "A new race. Not fully Eldritch, not fully human anymore either. Something planted and grown, not forced."
"What do you call it?" Jibril asked.
John looked at the three of them, and something in his chest settled into place alongside the answer.
"Eldran," he said. "That’s what I’m calling it. If you want it."