Path of Dragons

In the Shape of Venom and cloaked in Guise of the Unseen, Elijah perched in the branches, watching his nephew training with Trevor. The two moved in sync, fighting invisible opponents as they raced through the forest. Elijah focused on One with nature, and as the two practiced, ethera fluctuated within them. After a few moments, he recognized it for what it was.

They were working on their cultivation.

That simple realization opened the door in his mind to how varied cultivation methods could be. For him, the process usually required calm, quiet, and enough ethera to kill most other people. However, for Miguel and Trevor, physical training seemed to be a key component. It wasn’t the only piece of the puzzle – obviously – but watching them work was eye-opening. It also reminded Elijah that, for all of his progress, he’d still only barely scratched the surface of his new world. Every time he thought he understood things, he’d find a new piece of information that turned his comprehension on its head.

He kept watching for a little while longer until he felt satisfied with their progress. Their growth would never be as explosive as Elijah’s. With cultivation, he tended to take huge jumps, with long stretches of nothing in between. By contrast, Miguel’s path seemed steadier. So long as he kept working, the sky would be the limit. It was a reassuring thought, and soon enough, Elijah left them to their own devices, scampering through the branches until he was far enough away that they wouldn’t sense his presence. Only then did he take on the Shape of the Master and race through the forest.

After stopping off at the grove to check on his various projects, he continued on until he reached the ocean. He shifted back into his human form, undressed and stashed his things near a rock, then regained the Shape of the Master. In that form, he waded into the water before diving through the waves.

Once again, he was amazed at how at home in the water he was. Thankfully, he wasn’t like a true salamander, which couldn’t survive prolonged exposure to high-salinity water. For those mundane creatures, diving into the ocean would have caused an osmotic imbalance, which in turn would result in dehydration, cellular damage, and eventually, death. His current form had no such issues, which made him wonder about its evolutionary history.

Maybe the most appropriate answer to that query was the one word that seemed to apply to almost everything he didn’t really understand: magic.

Those thoughts accompanied him as he took a brief detour into deeper water. Elijah couldn’t quite quantify how quickly he could move underwater, but he knew it was pretty fast. Before long, he was miles out to sea and swimming among the splendid seascape beneath the waves.

Despite his apathy toward marine biology, he’d always appreciated the beauty that seemed so common to ocean life. And the injection of ethera into the equation had only magnified everything. Just like on land, everything in the sea was bigger, more vibrant, and teeming with so much vitality that it was almost overwhelming. For a while, Elijah just swam there, treading water as he appreciated everything appropriately.

Not only were there huge stands of waving kelp and massive formations of coral, but the fish and other sea life had grown in both size and splendor. Elijah saw trout the size of sharks, an enormous octopus crawling its way among the forest of seaweed, and colorful shrimp bigger than his head. It wasn’t a scene without conflict, though. Far from it. Everywhere he turned, he saw small battles playing out. Fish hunting one another was a staple, but Elijah could also sense the war between various forms of vegetation. It happened in slow-motion, as they all vied for the same valuable nutrients and sunlight, but it was no less vicious for it.

That was nature, though.

Even if, at first glance, it seemed peaceful, any observation told a tale of conflict.

Elijah soaked it all in until, after about an hour, he felt ready to take the next step. For he hadn’t undertaken the short bout of observation without reason. He’d had a purpose. As a Druid, he knew that an understanding of nature was at his core. So, if he wanted to put himself into the right frame of mind for something as important as pushing to the next stage of cultivation, Elijah knew he needed to immerse himself in the natural world.

And there was nothing as wild as the sea floor, where humans had such limited effect. It put him in the appropriate mindset for what was coming, and as Elijah embraced it, he swam back the way he’d come. However, when he arrived at the tunnel, he was surprised to find that there was a significant current of ethera flowing from the mouth. That, in turn, had promoted the growth of sea life around the tunnel, creating a ring of ethera-dense vegetation that spread for approximately ten feet all around it.

More importantly, when Elijah swam through the flora and entered the tunnel, he sensed that the current wasn’t limited to energy. The water was moving as well. Not with any significant speed, but it was definitely noticeable.

Elijah swam against the flow, and for the first time, wasn’t forced to drag himself through. Instead, he slithered along, cutting through the opposing current like it was nothing until, at last, he found the cave.

And it was entirely changed from the last time he’d visited. Indeed, when he thought of the barren, spherical cave he’d found years before, he had difficulty even believing it was the same place. The green crystals were the same, but the cave was so densely packed with life that Elijah found it difficult to find the center.

Beneath it all were the Leviathan’s Bones, which had done more than simply stabilize the area as he’d expected. Instead, they functioned like millions of tiny natural treasures, each of which emitted an aura of ethera that twisted together into a total that far exceeded the sum of its parts. Adding to that was the other vegetation, which fed off the increased ethera in a self-propagating cycle of energy that pushed it even further. And finally, it was all augmented by the grove’s influence, which had created an environment of dense ethera that far exceeded anywhere else on Earth.

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In short, it was a perfect cultivation environment.

Elijah was tempted to down the Will of Iron and start cycling energy through his core in an effort to expand its bounds. However, he knew that would be a mistake. Core cultivation was, in a lot of ways, dependent on the other categories, and it was exceedingly difficult to push it to a next stage before all the others had preceded it. Possible, sure. But not optimal. He knew he would get better results if he took things in their proper order.

That meant that he needed to work on his Soul first.

Fortunately, he had two potions to aid in that effort. So, after he floated in the cave for about an hour, soaking in the ethera and going over the patterns he’d memorized, Elijah opened his palm to reveal the pair of potions he’d brought with him. ŔÁꞐǑВËṣ

The Minor Potions of Mind and Body were more than their names suggested. At first, he’d expected them to only aid in the categories of cultivation their names implied, but Biggle had confirmed that they were applicable to any efforts in cultivation. How, Elijah didn’t know, but he knew he would take any help he could get.

So, without further ado, Elijah put the first vial to his mouth and worked the cork free with his tongue so he wouldn’t lose even a drop of the valuable potion. He swallowed the concoction – which tasted a bit like flat Pepsi – before repeating the action with the second potion. This one had a minty taste that Elijah couldn’t identify.

He wasn’t really in any position to concentrate on that, though, because the effects kicked in within a few seconds.

The first thing he noticed was that every facet of his Mind immediately came into focus. It was like all superfluous thoughts had been banished, and what’s more, his thoughts sped up. If he’d had the wherewithal to consider it, he might’ve wondered what precisely was going on. But that unnatural degree of focus worked against him in that respect, and he only had a mind for the task at hand.

Then, the Minor Potion of Body took hold, and his entire form went limp. Everything felt malleable in a way he couldn’t really articulate, but with his enhanced focus, he knew just how helpful that state could be.

So, he pushed his thoughts forward, and he dragged ethera into his body. He held it in his Core, increasing the pressure until he thought he was going to explode. Then, he created a tiny pinprick of an opening. Under such pressure, the ethera tore free, rocketing through his channels with such speed that he could barely control it. When it hit the terminus of the channel, Elijah leveraged every ounce of control he could muster, guiding it along the pattern he’d already memorized.

He only dug a few millimeters of channel before the flow dissipated, and doing so caused his body to erupt in pain. However, that was the first step. He had thousands, if not millions, more to go.

He repeated the process, gathering ethera, pressurizing it, then releasing a stream that he used to tunnel through his body in order to create a denser collection of channels. If pushing himself to the Neophyte stage had established his arteries, then this step created veins and capillaries.

But Elijah pushed it even further.

Minute by minute, he created one off-shoot after off-shoot, each one smaller than the last, until his arm was finished. When he beheld it with his senses, he saw that the most minute of them were no wider than an atom.

He wanted to go smaller.

He pushed and pushed, and slowly, the ethereal density in the cave began to dissipate. Fortunately, the Leviathan Bones rose to the challenge, outputting even more ethera than ever before. It was like they recognized the drain on the ambient ethera, and they struggled to maintain the balance they’d created.

It was beautiful.

And yet, Elijah had no mental bandwidth to notice. Instead, he continuously narrowed the off-shoots until, at last, they broke through his skin.

He let out a gurgling scream as his channels very nearly imploded from the decreased pressure. But with a mighty heave, Elijah gathered enough ethera through the apertures in his Mind that he normalized the pressure before establishing a tiny and temporary seal, cutting that part of his body off from his core.

If he hadn’t been underwater, he might’ve sighed in relief.

But he knew that he was on a timer, so he didn’t let himself lose even a second before he focused on his other arm, repeating the actions he’d taken. This time, when he reached the end, he was ready for the implosion, and he slapped a similar seal onto the hole he’d punched through the walls of his core.

Next came his left leg. Then his right.

He could feel the ethereal density in the cave waning. More, the potions had begun to wear off. He needed to push harder. To go faster. He needed to finish.

So, Elijah continued on, shoving every ounce of his willpower into the task as he dug an even denser collection of channels through his torso. It was more painful than ever before, but he managed to finish just before the potions’ effects dissipated.

But there was only one problem.

He still had one more body part that remained untouched.

By comparison to the rest of his body, the channels in his head looked woefully underdeveloped and painfully weak. Elijah couldn’t stop now. Not only would doing so come with a host of problems, but his sense of completion would not allow him to cease his efforts.

He knew it would be incredibly painful, though.

It turned out much worse than he ever could have expected. The first bit felt like someone had taken a pickaxe to his head. As it went on, a burning sensation was added to the mix. And finally, when he was on the final stretch, his entire Mind was twisted into submission. He only managed to keep going through sheer willpower and the pain tolerance he’d learned throughout his adventures.

But then he broke through.

The following implosion, which managed to take him by surprise due to the distraction of so much pain, nearly killed him before his sluggish mind could apply the patch. Even so, he lost consciousness for the briefest of moments, which very nearly robbed him of the momentum he needed to complete the task.

In the second following his brief bout of unconsciousness, Elijah’s instincts took over. He’d gone over his plan a thousand times, so he acted without conscious thought, simultaneously ripping each patch away.

Ethera surged within him, and the second the energy filled his channels, Elijah became aware of a notification:

Congratulations! Your Soul has reached the Student Stage.

He only had a moment to read that message before a wealth of information flooded his mind. The cascade was so intense that it nearly broke the Jade facets of his Mind. They managed to hold, albeit only barely. However, with so much strain, Elijah finally lost consciousness completely.

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