Book 1: Chapter 20: Neophyte Soul

Book 1: Chapter 20: Neophyte Soul

From the top of the cliff, Elijah studied the encampment across the strait separating his island from what he expected was the mainland, and what he found was inexplicably infuriating. With Eyes of the Eagle, he could clearly see the beginnings of a primitive town nestled at the foot of a mountain. The low-slung buildings had been constructed of seamless concrete – or some magical variant, he expected – from which grew thick smokestacks that were steadily belching black clouds into the otherwise pristine air.

The town was surrounded by thick forests not unlike what Elijah had found on his island, but the inhabitants had waged a war against the flora, clearing large swathes of trees in the process. No doubt, they had been used as fuel for their fires. Or perhaps they’d been used to construct the sturdy-looking barges moored at the town’s simplistic dock. Either way, the sight filled Elijah with a degree of sorrow he couldn’t adequately describe.

He'd never really been an environmentalist – not like many of his colleagues. Certainly, he’d always tried to conserve where he could, and he had never been an unrepentant polluter, but he also knew that environmental issues were far more complicated than the hardcore activists wanted to admit. In a vacuum, it was easy to tell people to drive electric cars or eschew eating meat, but those were solutions only available to a select few. Others had to do what they had to do, regardless of environmental consequences.

That wasn’t to say that Elijah didn’t want to hold industry accountable for their profit-driven choices. He did. He just understood that things were far less simple than they might appear to be at first glance.

However, when he looked upon that decimated forest and the billowing black smoke, he felt a degree of anger he’d never felt before. Clearly, that was his Nature aspect – and the connection that came with his archetype – screaming at him. He did his best to push it to the back of his mind, but it was difficult.

The fact that the inhabitants of that town didn’t appear to be human helped, though. Elijah didn’t know what any of them were called, but he saw creatures that reminded him of stereotypical fantasy dwarves, gnomes, and goblins, all of which were working together.

Soon, Elijah noticed a flood of the small-statured creatures pour out of what he thought was a mountain cave. Upon further inspection, though, he saw that each of those people – if indeed, that was the right word – was carrying a mining pick. After that, it didn’t take much longer for Elijah to notice the carts full of unrefined ore, though he was too far away to utilize his limited geological knowledge to identify what it was.

Elijah stood there, watching the town from miles away, until he could confidently say that the entire settlement was a mining operation. Likely, the chimneys belching clouds of billowing black smoke were connected to smelters, from which they would extract metal from the raw ore.

More than that, though, Elijah saw that the refined metals were taken to the biggest building, which looked more elaborate than all the rest. For some reason, he didn’t think he was looking at a warehouse. The building was too elaborate and far too small to serve that purpose. And given that his own spell, Ancestral Circle, had a teleportation component, it didn’t take him long to guess that the alliance of dwarves, gnomes, and goblins had access to something similar.

Or perhaps he was wrong. He was still far too new to the transformed world to understand what was and wasn’t possible. However, he felt unreasonably confident in his assertions.

For a while, Elijah wondered what he should do. The distance from the island to the town wasn’t short; at least ten miles, but probably more than that, separated him from the coast. So, it would not be an easy trip, even if he managed to construct a raft of some sort. He never even considered swimming; seeing the transformation of the trout, with all their extra teeth, was enough to dissuade him from that notion. And that wasn’t even considering that the monster that had almost killed him had come from the sea. Who knew what else was down there?

After a while, Elijah realized that, while the discovery was interesting, it didn’t really affect his situation. With the inability to cross the strait, the best he could do was create a bonfire and hope they saw it. Then, he’d have to hope that they were friendly, which wasn’t entirely likely, given that the town’s inhabitants weren’t even human. No – nothing had changed, save for the fact that he needed to be on his guard.

Which was the same as always.

As the sun began to dip toward the horizon, Elijah reluctantly turned away and started back toward his cabin. Fortunately, he’d long since mastered traversal through the thick foliage, so he made good time back to the Grove. There, he did a circuit around the clearing, keeping Nature’s Bounty active, before he retreated to his cabin where prepared some stew, which was comprised of seaweed, crab meat, and mushrooms.

So, the same thing he ate most days.

Over the next six weeks, Elijah continued the rhythm of his existence. Even as the weather grew colder and more inhospitable, his days maintained the familiar cadence of improvement and the necessities of survival. From time to time, he’d go back to the cliff, where he continued to observe his neighbors. The town grew, with many of the buildings gaining an extra story or two. And whether it was imagination or not, the population seemed to increase as well. So, too, did their impact on the environment.

Elijah seethed as he watched the forest’s retreat, but he had no idea what to do about it. Nor was he sure if he truly cared if they cleared a little bit of the woodland. There were plenty of trees out there, after all. But he felt what he felt, artificial or not, and he couldn’t escape it.

Toward the end of the sixth week, though, Elijah had a breakthrough that cut right through the monotony.

It happened as he sat next to the tree at the center of his Grove; the saplings had continued to grow, and they were on the verge of becoming proper trees. He could feel his spell teetering on the edge of activation. But that wasn’t the source of his breakthrough. Instead, that distinction belonged to what he’d begun to refer to as his soul cultivation.

The pathways of Elijah’s soul had continued to thicken; the effect was only minute, but even a small change was cause for celebration because it allowed him to channel more Ethera into Nature’s Bounty, which in turn caused the spell’s radius to increase. In the beginning, it had only been about ten feet wide, but now, the circle’s diameter was at least fifteen feet.

Following the same pattern he always did, Elijah flexed the Ethera, pushing against the boundaries of his pathways. They stretched, but he felt that they could take more, so he continued to shove more Ethera through them. Then, suddenly, something snapped.

Elijah gasped as the Ethera ran wild, tearing down the limits imposed by his pathways. In the space of a second, his entire soul began to degrade under the influence of the tidal wave of Ethera. Panicking, he tried to stem the flow, but his cultivation System had no interest in following his commands. Instead, Ethera flooded through his mind, dragged into his soul from his surroundings. Meanwhile, the energy in his core came in from the other side, and when the two energies met, they did so with explosive force.

The world felt like it was ripping him in two. Elijah screamed, but it was useless. He could hardly think amidst the pain, much less find a solution to the problem. Over and over, those two opposing forces crashed against one another, sending agony arcing through Elijah’s body, soul, and mind.

It went on for a subjective eternity as the Ethera tormented him. Before, Elijah had considered the energy benign, but free from the confines of his cultivation System, it was an incredibly destructive force. Especially when the two different flavors – the wild Ethera and the energy from his core – clashed.

But Elijah endured. He couldn’t have said how. He didn’t know why. He just clung to his life with as much fervor as could muster as he maintained the grip on his sanity. And slowly, the clashing energies transformed his pathways.

But they didn’t grow wider. In fact, they were destroyed completely, and the loose Ethera was freed to rampage through his body. But as the seconds turned to minutes, and minutes turned to hours, the transformation took hold, and suddenly, he crested the peak, and his body – or his soul – started to absorb the Ethera. At first, it only took a trickle, but soon, that trickle became a torrent.

Then, at last, Elijah’s soul drank the last of the Ethera that had been raging through his body, and he collapsed. When he did, a new notification appeared in his mind’s eye:

Congratulations! You have cultivated a Neophyte Soul!

He only had a moment to study that notification and smile before unconsciousness overtook him.