The Fourth Secret: A Fantasy LitRPG Adventure (Divine Apostasy Book 4) A. Kay (best management books of all time .TXT) 📖

Ruwen. He remained relaxed, ready to fight if necessary, as she grabbed his right wrist. She turned it palm up and smeared a complicated rune on his wrist. “I am Echo, and my blood name is my oath to repay this debt. Touch my blood, say my name, and I will appear.”

The blood burned Ruwen’s wrist, as if written in lava. He didn’t like having a demon tracking symbol on his wrist. “You didn’t need to do that, Echo. My name is Ruwen, and you’d have done the same for me.”

Echo locked gazes with Ruwen. The blackness of her eyes was so complete they felt like holes he had fallen into. “You are wrong, Ruwen. I would have left you.”

Echo dropped Ruwen’s hand, turned, and disappeared into the mist. He rubbed at the rune, the pain only now fading. He had given Echo thirty of his minutes, and with their conversation, he now had fifty-three minutes left.

Ruwen strode into the fog, but he moved slower now so he could look for traps. The mist absorbed every sound, and even the wind blowing through the leaves above had disappeared. The creaks and pops of the bending bamboo sounded distant and faint. So it wasn’t until he was almost in the water that he heard the stream.

Following the stream would lead him directly uphill, and he smiled at the good fortune. The bamboo grew denser along the banks, so Ruwen walked in the water instead. The water didn’t feel cold, which meant it must not originate from a glacier, and his bare feet touched mostly gravel.

Ruwen’s minutes had reached twenty-two when he found a clump of black sorrow fruit. They grew in the bank's shadow, and he almost missed them. The three small fruit looked like black raspberries. He placed two in his right sleeve and ate the last.

Like the other fruit, the black sorrow tasted sweet. But the sweetness mingled with a tart taste that made him wish he had a handful of them. The fruit added thirty minutes to his counter, bringing him to fifty-two, and while he could still see his body, he verified in a calm area of the water that his reflection had disappeared. To anyone looking, he was invisible.

Ruwen moved forward with much more confidence. The stream would take him uphill and he had two black and five red sorrow fruit in his sleeves, sixty-five minutes. For the first time, he felt truly confident about getting to the summit.

As Ruwen climbed, he found it harder to breathe. It felt like he pulled a thousand-pound weight behind him. The sensation felt so real he turned and looked behind him. But only the stream and mist were there.

Before Ascendancy, his mind had been his entire focus, and he had cared little about his body. But since then, he had worked hard, and many points had gone into Strength and Stamina. He felt vain thinking about it, but he’d become proud of his body. Walking up a stream certainly shouldn’t be this hard.

Ruwen thought about resting for a while and then shook his head angrily. He strode forward instead, upset with himself for even having that thought. The invisible weight remained, and he leaned forward, but it didn’t help.

Pine had warned Ruwen that the mountain itself would try to make him fail. Maybe this weight was part of that. He gritted his teeth and pushed himself forward, determined not to let his mind stop him.

The sound of crashing water caused Ruwen to focus on his surroundings. He had moved in a daze, and twenty minutes had gone by, bringing him down to thirty-two minutes. Thank Uru he had been following the stream. If he’d zoned out like that in the bamboo, who knows where he might have walked.

This mist had thinned here, and the waterfall looked like a sheet of water ten feet across. It disappeared into the mist fifty feet above Ruwen. The side of a mountain stretched fifty feet in both directions before the fog obscured it, forcing him to make a decision.

Climbing this rock face was out of the question. Ruwen hated heights, and he had no idea how far this cliff rose. With this enormous weight that pulled on him, he didn’t even know if he could climb. That meant choosing either left or right and following the base until he could find a way up.

A wave of hopelessness crashed into Ruwen and he sat in the water. Why was he even here? None of this mattered. Seeing his parents mattered, and he needed to return to do that. His life had turned from simple to complicated since his Ascendancy, and this Step training was an unneeded distraction. Sitting here felt so nice. The sound of the falling water relaxed him, and he didn’t have to pull that terrible weight.

Ruwen watched the counter on his palm drop to thirty. He had gone years without seeing a waterfall, and now this was the third one he’d seen since his Ascendancy. The other two times acted as bookends for his time in the Spirit Realm. The lake with the giant octopus Tickles had a lot of waterfalls filling it, and their trip in the Spirit Realm had started near a waterfall in Fractal.

Sift had been so excited about it, convinced that waterfalls hid treasure. Ruwen frowned. Madda had said Sift completed this trial right before meeting Ruwen. He thought back to Sift’s exact words in the Spirit Realm when they were deciding what to do, “there is always treasure behind a waterfall.”

Ruwen pushed himself to his feet and approached the waterfall. The closer he got, the louder the noise became until it felt as if the sound was trying to repel him. He ignored the thoughts telling him to stop, holding on to Sift’s words of treasure.

The water hit Ruwen like a thousand fists, and he stuck his hands out, searching for an entrance. He traced them back and forth, but his hands only found rock. Had