Path of Dragons

Elijah’s shoulders slumped in exhaustion – both mental and physical – as he took a long, deep breath. The salty air tasted almost sweet after spending so much time beneath the ocean, fighting against wave after wave of alaken. He waded forward until he reached the beach, then dropped to his knees before rolling over and collapsing onto his back. One deep breath followed the last as he closed his eyes.

“That was pretty rough, bro.”

Elijah opened one eye to see Dat sitting beside him. The Witch Hunter was staring off into the middle distance, his gaze entirely unfocused as he clearly considered their actions over the past week.

“To say the least,” Elijah agreed.

And it was true, too. While grinding against the alaken hadn’t been as dangerous as enduring the other challenges, it had come with a few other issues none of them had anticipated. Chiefly, the weight of killing tens of thousands of clearly sapient beings pressed heavily upon their minds. Certainly, everyone knew the creatures weren’t real – not in the traditional sense. That fact was confirmed when the entire challenge reset after they’d left. However, that line between real and conjured tended to blur when you were surrounded by floating entrails, submerged in the blood of those purportedly fake enemies, and listening to their muffled and bubbling screams of agony.

Perhaps things would have been different if they’d given themselves a break between iterations of the challenge. However, with time being of the essence, they’d chosen to chain grinding sessions after only a couple of hours in between each one. That had turned the past week into a tidal wave of death, blood, and other viscera that none of them could endure unscathed.

Apparently, post-traumatic stress was still a thing, even after the world’s transformation. It didn’t cripple anyone. Nobody was going to wake up screaming in the middle of the night, and they certainly weren’t going to descend into panic at loud noises. However, the other signs were still there.

“I think I can speak for everyone when I say that I never want to do that again,” Ron stated. Elijah felt him nearby, lying on the pebbled shore only a few feet away. Sadie was still standing, but her posture mirrored Dat’s. By comparison, Kurik busied himself by grumbling under his breath and cataloguing his remaining traps. Everyone coped differently, and Elijah knew the dwarf well enough to recognize the stress within him.

“We can’t avoid killing,” Sadie said. “That’s our world, now.”

Of late, there hadn’t been much time for anything but slaughtering the eel-like alaken, but Elijah could recognize that something had changed with Sadie. She’d never been particularly personable, but she’d grown even more standoff-ish than ever before. He worried that he’d done something to offend her, yet he knew that broaching that subject would only make her angry.

Or angrier.

So, he’d kept his concerns to himself, choosing to address it with Dat when they had a little privacy.

“I’m going to rest my eyes a bit,” he muttered. He was dirty, covered in blood and salty water, with bits of gore and seaweed in his hair, so he knew he needed to take a shower. But at the moment, his goals were much simpler. After casting Healing Rain and Soothe on everyone, he promptly fell asleep.

When he awoke a few hours later, he regretted that.

“Gross,” he muttered, looking down at his armor. He could only hope that his cleaning powder would take care of all the blood and other nastiness that had seemingly seeped into the leather. So, after telling the others what he was doing, he retreated to a secluded area surrounded by boulders and began the arduous process of removing the grime from his armor, clothing, and most importantly, himself.

The armor, he doused in cleaning powder before setting it aside. However, when he looked at the clothing he wore underneath, he realized that, regrettably, it represented a lost cause. There were so many rips and tears – not to mention stains – that it had become unsalvageable. Better to simply destroy it than to spend time and resources patching the clothes.

Once that decision was made, he tossed the bundle of cloth aside to be burned later, then embarked on an epic quest of self-cleaning. That’s when his decision to immediately fall asleep came back to bite him. The blood and salt had dried on his body, forming a truly grotesque crust that took quite a lot of vigorous scrubbing before it came off. Thankfully, his homemade soap was up to the task, and it left him feeling invigorated in a way that he couldn’t quite explain.

According to Nerthus, the soap was capable of slowly inching him forward in regards to his body cultivation. It would take decades for it to do so on its own, but the fact that it could even do that much made it extremely valuable. Still, he used it because of the way it made him feel, rather than some far-off benefits that wouldn’t come to fruition for years. But it was a nice side-benefit, nonetheless.

In any case, it took almost half an hour of vigorous scrubbing before Elijah felt clean. By that point, the cleaning powder had already done its work on his armor, so after donning one of his last outfits, he strapped the leather set into place. With it – along with all his other equipment – came an influx of attributes that only accentuated his refreshment.

Finally, when he returned to their camp, he pulled out his French press, boiled some water, then made some coffee. Everyone else – aside from Sadie, who maintained her inexplicable disdain for the miraculous beverage – partook, following it up with a meal of dried pork that restored the last of Elijah’s buffs.

And just like that, he felt normal enough to check his gains:

Name	Elijah Hart
Level	109
Archetype	Druid
Class	Animist
Specialization Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.	Connection
Alignment	N/A
Strength	191 (125)
Dexterity	179 (113)
Constitution	196 (136)
Ethera	172 (134)
Regeneration	203 (125)
Attunement	Nature
Cultivation Stage: Adept
Body	Core	Mind	Soul
Iron	Whelp	Jade	Novice

During their grinding session, he’d gained three levels. At one point, that wouldn’t have seemed like such a big deal, but after he’d reached level one hundred, Elijah had discovered just how difficult it was to progress. Each level, even from the very beginning, took more experience than the last, but after passing the century mark, the amount required to reach the next level increased at a much higher rate. If he’d had to quantify it, he would have said that it took half again more experience to go from level one hundred to one-oh-one than it had to progress from level ninety-nine to the hundredth level. And that increase seemed to hold, with each level taking fifty percent more than the last, with every subsequent step of progression. ŗàＮȏＢËŜ

As a result, his march toward his class evolution had all but stalled. So, gaining three levels in a week was an incredible amount of progression. Even so, Elijah was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t quite tipped over to one-ten, which would have given him a new spell.

The others had all experienced significant gains as well. Elijiah knew that Sadie had past the century mark even before the session, but Dat, Ron, and Kurik still hadn’t. Because of that, they’d gained more levels, which Elijah had to admit, made him a little jealous. More, it made the gap between them seem a bit less impressive than it really was. Regardless, he was happy for his companions.

“Should we go back in?” asked Ron, still enjoying his steaming cup of coffee. “I feel like there’s still a lot of experience to be gained.”

“We agreed on a week,” Elijah said.

“I don’t want to see another alaken for as long as I live, bro.”

“I just got my beard dry,” Kurik added.

Sadie said, “We need to move on. They’ve already started to give diminishing returns.”

That was true, and to Elijah, it made sense. The same thing happened with towers, and though the rule seemed to have been relaxed with the challenges, the system clearly didn’t want them to spend the entire Trial running the same challenge over and over again.

“I agree. I’m ready to go to the next challenge,” he said. In his trips back to the Nexus Town, he’d asked around, and he had found that two other challenges had already been discovered. The one associated with the Umbra – or the Shadow Realm – was located far to the north within a forest that was eternally cast in shadow. The Explorer who’d found it lost his entire group, and there were a few others who’d gone in and failed to return.

Not surprising. First clears were always rough.

Then, there was the challenge dedicated to the Ethereum, or the Plane of Magic. It took the form of a massive tower that stood sentry over an enormous chasm that was described as radiating corruption. Elijah wasn’t certain what that meant, but he was relieved to find that it was contained by a wall of ethera that kept the worst of it at bay.

Those were the last two challenges, but there was one that he expected would be different than all the rest. The Abyss was represented within the Trial, though no one had discovered that challenge’s location. Still, crossing the entire continent and overcoming the other two challenges would take at least a couple more months. So, they didn’t have time to dawdle.

Even so, the others needed a little more time to recover – both mentally and physically – from the grinding session, which left Elijah a bit fidgety. That was why, after enjoying his coffee and meal, he found himself gliding over the forest’s canopy. There was one location that stood out in his mind, and it was one he’d been itching to investigate since its discovery.

That was how he found himself landing just on the outskirts of the overgrown plaza which contained hundreds of stone statues. Some had been destroyed, crushed to pieces by wildlife or pulled down by creeping vines. The effects of erosion, felt over what looked to be hundreds of years, likely played a part as well, and many of the statues were half-buried beneath the jungle’s rich soil.

Elijah approached in his Shape of Venom, hidden beneath the Guise of the Unseen. He didn’t sense any hostile creatures nearby, and his Connection-boosted One with Nature gave him significant insight into any hidden dangers associated with the environment. It wasn’t foolproof – as he’d learned during previous adventures – but it was enough to tell him that there were no booby traps or other hidden mechanisms. The area was just as it appeared to be – an abandoned ruin begging for exploration and hopefully yielding some explanation.

With that in mind, Elijah padded forward, and soon enough, he was among the hulking statues. Each one boasted a core of weak ethera that Elijah could only barely sense, though he had no notion of what that meant. Those little balls of energy, nestled deep within the huge statues’ chests, flickered and periodically faded, almost as if they struggled to maintain ignition.

What little of the plaza remained uncovered put Elijah in mind of a chessboard. The tiles alternated between light and dark, but that gave him no notion of their – or the plaza’s – nature. Was it simply an art installation? Or was something else at play? Elijah couldn’t fathom the answers to those questions. So, he continued his exploration, eventually finding two interesting characteristics.

First, ringing the plaza were the remnants of great columns that he’d initially mistaken for boulders. Only when he saw the fluting – weathered by the elements and time – that he recognized their nature. Soon after, he saw a piece of white rock with incredibly straight lines that he quickly surmised had been the pediment that rested atop those columns. Following that, he found other remains of what he eventually came to think of as an open-air temple boasting hundreds of tall columns and a sloped roof.

The second major discovery he made was in the center of the temple’s remains. Surrounded by hundreds of statues was a tall plinth, at the foot of which was a fallen and broken sculpture that was so weathered that it looked like nothing more than a collection of rocks. It didn’t take much to recognize that it had once stood upon that central pedestal.

But more interestingly, there was something buried beneath all the rubble. Elijah could scarcely discern its shape, it was filled with so much ethera, but if something was that powerfully magical, then he definitely wanted to look at it with his own two eyes.

And take it.

Because no adventurer worth his salt turned down loot.

So, after shifting back into his human form, he dug through the rubble, tossing aside hunks of stone that weighed more than a ton until he finally laid eyes on the item. It was a long, tapered shaft of blue-white crystal. Down the center of that shaft was a yellow core. Elijah reached out, barely touching it with the tip of his finger, but when nothing happened, he wrapped his hand around it and pulled.

At first, nothing happened. It was stuck fast, and regardless of how much he yanked, the thing wouldn’t come free. So, he took on the Shape of the Guardian and put some real muscle to the task. Even then, it resisted mightily until, at last, the sound of breaking rock heralded the shaft’s freedom. Elijah went tumbling backward, but he was less concerned with his loss of balance than the wave of ethera that swept through the plaza.

A second later, the sound of grating rock drew his attention. When he looked out across the plaza, he realized that he’d made a huge mistake.

“Oh, shit,” he muttered to himself as hundreds of stone statues came to life.

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