Breaker of Horizons: A LitRPG Adventure, page 46
“But the curse is still there?” he asked, through Inkspur.
“Mhm. Power in my family is passed from parent to the child. When new hatchlings are born the father is…” She gestured awkwardly, but innuendo wouldn’t do here. He just blinked until she continued. “Sacrificed. His cultivation is split among the newborn. The power of the mother, meanwhile, is given to a single child when they come of age. It becomes a mantle, a ghost-like presence that guards the new generation. The most powerful mantles contain a thousand years of souls and are able to break the skies.
“But for the past three generations, anyone who has inherited the matriarch’s mantle has been cursed and robbed of their ability to cultivate. I was the least talented of my sisters, and so I chose to volunteer myself for the clan’s sake, hoping to pass the mantle on until we can find a cure for the curse. I doubt this little thing can stand up to a D-Class malediction, but…”
She turned her hand over. The cuts covered nearly half of her pale skin. “It may slow my end. And for that I thank you.”
“Would you mind me planting a few things?” Nic asked. “I, uh, I have some valuable treasures I want to grow.”
“Go ahead. I trust you to be careful and take responsibility for what you plant.” Nylea nodded.
Nic took out several things. The first was the Esper fruit tree. Clearing a wide swathe of forest, he pressed its roots into the ground by the enormous central mountain, entwining the massive peak of stone with an even greater expanse of leaf and bark.
Pushing his finger into the earth to dig three pits around the base, he added more.
To defend the tree he planted the liquid shard of the bismuth elemental he’d defeated. To tend and nurture the roots, he planted the corpse of one of the golden scarabs from the Valley of Memory, its body full of Essence.
Finally, he cut his own finger and dropped a single ruby tear of blood into the final pit, before shoveling all three closed.
“Interesting…” Nylea watched with a smile. “What do you think will grow?”
“Hopefully? A race of tiny, unkillable bastards. Maybe one of them will be better prepared for this whole hero thing than I am, and I can get some rest.”
She just laughed and patted his head.
Reaching down, she pushed the teardrop jewel into the earth by the tree’s roots as well. A fourth blessing.
Looking at the sour wasteland left behind by the worm’s destruction, Nic decided he could do more. Taking varieties of poison weed and fruit from his bag, he made places for them in the soil, as well as dropping in water, salt, and other things he thought might replenish the land. Finally, he let Redjaw scramble down his arm, entering into the new territory as small shoots of poison life began to blossom from the soil.
Compared to the creatures of the Saturnalia, Redjaw was a god. And he would be a good god for the dark crop that would grow in this land, which Nic imagined as a formidable jungle splitting the continent’s peninsula from the mainland.
Next, he found a ruined area of vast red desert. The only things standing were stubs of marble run to roughness in the wind. Sunfire took this post, and Nic filled the earth with the bones of his enemies alongside to make sure the tiny lizard would have his hands full ruling this inhospitable land. Digging deep into his bag, he took one of the shotgun shells he’d won from the cursed guard and planted it in the very center of the red barrens.
There was only one thing left to do.
In a small corner of the world where things were peaceful, Nic pushed the bubblegum Matteos had given him into a small pit and covered it up.
With that done, he turned to Nylea. “Last time you asked about my world. Wanna hear some more? It wasn’t a great world, but”—he shrugged—“there were lots of small things about it. Little, tucked-away places where you got the best spicy noodles. Tiny parks that grew in the hidden lots where the backs of four buildings lined up and made a well. Lots of stuff like that…”
“I’d love to.” She smiled a bright, utterly genuine smile.
Nic grinned back.
For the next hour or so they stood on the temple balcony, exchanging stories. Nylea came from a world of immense jungles that spread across a continent surrounded by seas of stars. The oceans were full of pitch-black water that consumed everything it touched, except for the bright, shining points of submerged mountains they called celestites.
He didn’t understand how she could be so fascinated by City d23 after that, but she was. She particularly loved the story of how he and Tarquin got caught by one of the city’s shifts—the time when a massive square of buildings lifted up on its concrete foundation and was moved to a new position—and had to hang dangling from a sewer pipe for hours before someone hauled them up.
“Sofia?” he asked suddenly. “What was your homeworld like?”
When Nylea looked at him questioningly, he added, “My Sophont. Uh, the voice in my head that tells me what the System knows.”
“I-I wasn’t expecting this kind of questioning, Nicolas. I don’t know how much—”
She paused and then said, “My homeworld, the homeworld of all Sophonts, is and was called the Etude Daofield. It was a cylindrical world. You could look up and see the world curving above you, all green fields and lakes. And you would see the Spindle. A vast pillar of fire that extended for the entire length of the world, millions of miles up, lifting from the firmament of existence in a straight line.
“There were holes in the cylinder. Vast rifts where you could stare out and see stars. Some civilizations even lived in the rocky, ice-clad mountains of the outside.
“But the thing to understand is that the Spindle would pulse. Ripples would run through, weeks apart, in a rhythm. Where the solar winds this created touched the rifts a music played. The entire world was a single song endlessly repeating.
“It was said that anyone who could walk the world in a spiral, beginning at the highest point and ending at the lowest, would come to understand the Concept of Music. Not just a fraction, not a sliver. The whole and complete Concept.
“And when Pathos came to the world, she did.
“But there was a consequence—a terrible one, one she never foresaw.
“At the moment of her triumph, the Spindle went out.
“The Sophonts were first deployed as messengers and managers. Our first task was to organize the creation of thousands of tiny artificial suns, trying to restore light to the darkened world. We did. But so much was lost before we could save it. Whole civilizations starved without daylight for their crops. They regressed to savages. Forests wilted to nothing. Seas drifted with rotting layers of dead fish.
“But Pathos wouldn’t allow our work to be for nothing. She restored the world, over decades. And now the Etude is the center of the Garden Worlds, the core of her domain. We used what we learned revitalizing that world to spread peace and verdant growth to others. Tragedy became triumph because Pathos never once gave up.”
Chapter 68
Lo-Fi Axolotls to Relax to
After Sofia’s story, Nic was in a pensive mood. Saying goodbye to Nylea, he drifted back to the Saturnalia and let Inkspur slip off his arm to go scuttling up and wrap around the Esper fruit tree.
Nic brought out the meditation mat from his bag and sat down, legs crossed.
He drew the Scion Awakening scroll from his bag. It was a faded scroll of rough paper illustrated with flaking gold illustrations and lapis blue ink, with a massive illustration of a red heart in a trio of sunburst halos. A dense tangle of meridian lines and nodes were illustrated within the heart, tangling together through the veins and chambers. A runic seal enveloping the seven innermost nodes was cataloged.
Beneath, Nic’s eyes glazed over as he realized the entire thing was written in the driest, most formal language imaginable.
“Sofia? Can you give me the short version?”
“Nicolas, the ‘short version’ is that you’ll be seizing manual control over your meridians and shifting them to form a complex sealing mark within your own beating heart. Which could explode, at any moment, if you’re suicidal enough to take the ‘short version’.”
“Point.” Nic sighed and began to read. The first step was to send careful pulses of aura through the hair-thin meridians in his heart, feeling out the structure. Almost all races possessed the same seven inner nodes—called the Bloodline Gate in the scroll—but the structure of surrounding veins was entirely different between different species.
To map the flow, he would first need to carefully feel out each vein and branch, being especially careful to find places where the meridians had been weakened.
It was slow work. The first few times Nic tried he drastically overestimated the strength required, and he had to pull back as sharp pains gripped his chest. As he found the correct rhythm, he had to try to sense what the pulses were telling him like estimating how much water was inside a flask by shaking it. Small ripples as the pulse emerged on the other side of his heart meant there were impurities or weaknesses in the meridians. Larger ripples indicated a fork in the path he’d have to explore.
At first, he got nowhere at all. It was frustrating, trying to sort out differences between what felt like identical pulses of energy—the best comparison was trying to hear fractional differences in two notes of the exact same pitch and volume.
With a sigh, he stood up, plucking an Esper fruit from the tree. New ones were already beginning to grow as pale white buds on the branches. He paused to look with bleary eyes over his world, but the poison jungle was still a low stubble of newborn trees, and Redjaw had fallen asleep among the ruins of the ancient battlefield.
The desert he’d set aside for Sunfire was more promising—but also more ominous. Fiery red scars extended across the earth where he’d planted the shotgun shell, full of magma and fuming up with toxic sulfurs. Sunjaw was eagerly tearing apart a massive rhinoceros—massive by the world’s standards, at least.
Nic lifted the both of them into his arms and had them fill up a vial each before he set them back down, patting them on the head. They would be advancing soon too, especially if the tiny world could help them grow…
He slid back down onto the mat.
The goal of the Scion Ascension scroll was to form a seal that would collect all the traces of ancient bloodlines in his ancestry, filtering them into a single ruby crystal at the center of the seal. During his evolution, the seal would break, and his heart would literally explode, unleashing the ancient bloodlines at full strength for a single moment.
If done properly, it would allow him to seize a greater evolution than normally possible, resulting in a transformation that would reform his heart without lasting harm.
If not...
Either you clawed your way up the great chain of being, or you died trying. A failure would normally only stunt your growth, but with this technique, it would end your life.
So, it was important he got this right. Nic bit into the fruit and felt cool relaxation flood through his aching skull, clearing away his headache to replace it with concentration and calm. Pushing endless streams of thin aura through his body, Nic began to draw with his eyes closed, sketching out the pathways and branches as he uncovered them. The end result didn’t look too much like the diagram, but all seven nodes where were they needed to be.
Of course, he still had to clear out dozens of impurities, and worse, he needed to fortify the walls of his meridians where battle had weakened them. The ideal way to practice this skill was really to have a more experienced mentor purge his meridians for him like he would do for Redjaw, Sunfire, and Inkspur when they were ready to advance.
By this point, Nic was coated in slimy excretions like sweat. He pulled a rag from his mystic bag to begin to wipe it away, then paused. This place had to have a bath, right? And he’d saved their princess, sooo…
Climbing to his feet, Nic padded through the empty temple.
Numerous rooms were empty. A library where he briefly wandered, searching the books. They were mostly histories and fairytales. A few abandoned bedrooms where the wind pushed through broken windows. Some fire had left half of them empty pits covered in ash.
But there was a bathroom.
Nic found an enormous claw-footed golden tub. Small metal arms held crystal stones above the bowl, and as he touched them, he discovered they used trace amounts of aura to make hot and cold water. Small dishes held fragrant soaps and oils.
He poured a cool, cold bath and climbed in, his skin tingling with delight at being immersed in water. Poor axolotls weren’t really made to do all the climbing, wandering, and trekking he put himself through. They were creatures made to bathe all day and blow bubbles in the water.
Nic sank down to his neck, then deeper. His gills opened, and he stared up at the calm, rippling surface of the bath from below, happy and weightless.
He opened his mouth and burbled out, “Cultivation map, please.”
It snapped open, and Nic sent his full well of Essence streaming into the Spirits of the Earth ability, which he’d partially unlocked before. This time, the dark node chimed and flashed as it fully opened, becoming a well of bright light among the rivers of golden essence that flowed through his body like a starmap.
He breathed deeply beneath the water, thinking slowly.
After this, he intended to unlock his Secondary Slot for Adhesive Touch and develop it into Mire-Caller. The only reason he’d waited so long was that the skill was useless in the desert. Once he had the skill, he’d have an easier time binding enemies to pull out their Shards whole and intact, so the investment would pay for itself in time.
And then? The responsible answer was to fight forwards to the fifty thousand Essence needed to add a Secondary Shard to his Poison Mist. That was the requirement for truly reaching E-Class in spirit as well as body.
Without that, evolution to an E-Class body would only be a half-step.
But it was tempting to follow the path of finishing his Adhesive Touch’s base enhancement line instead. Receiving another spirit vision would help him understand his abilities, especially if he waited until he fused Shards into Mire-Caller.
Cultivating was like grasping at sands. Something always slipped through.
Nic’s eyes flickered open for a moment, and he froze. A tiny creature was sitting on the crystal that produced the bathwater. It had a roughly human shape but at the size of a single finger, with long wings of blue energy that extended from its back. Featherlike protrusions replaced hair, and her ‘skin’ was made of rippling energy like water.
Nic straightened up at once.
“Sofia?”
“Relax, Nicolas. It’s a sylph. They’re tiny forms of elemental. Or rather, elementals are created when massive numbers of sylphs flock together for a common cause. They’re everywhere, but only those with a certain spiritual sight can see them.”
“Oh,” Nic mumbled. The bath was making him sleepy, and honestly, he’d spent enough time running around naked that he didn’t care about someone watching him bathe.
Well. Maybe he’d care a little if it was Nylea.
“So it’s been there the whole time?” he asked. On the tap, the little sylph tilted her head this way and that, studying him. She’d probably never seen an axolotl before.
“There, and many more places. They appear wherever the Essence is purely concentrated towards one element. Clear rivers. Deep caverns. Wherever the elements stand undisturbed in their glory, sylphs congregate, filling the places where humans don’t tread. When they’re threatened, they form warbands and raise what you think of as elementals to serve as puppets.
“This one probably arose from the water crystal. They don’t appear in cities often, but they do sometimes form from simple elemental devices.”
Nic leaned forward, bathwater pushing around his chest like he was a leviathan appearing from the deep. He reached out his hand, and the sylph slowly stepped into his palm. “So… does she make the tap work, or does the tap make her?”
“Both. The relationship is symbiotic. But she probably formed long before the water crystal was harvested, when it was an unpolished stone at the basin of a lake or in a river.”
“Interesting. So if I gather sylphs and use materials from places with strong elements…”
“You’re on the right track. Your enchantments would be strengthened by their presence. Potentially, you could even evoke elementals instead of your usual echoes of the dead.”
Just another ball to juggle in the great show of cultivation.
He let the sylph run up and down his body for a while, dancing along his skin. She felt like a raindrop landing on him with each step. Eventually, she tired and dissolved into mist, streaming back into the water crystal.
Nic slowly sank back under the water and closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep…
When Nic awoke and padded back to the temple’s main room, the sun was already shining. Thin streams of dawn illuminated the central chamber from high, ruined windows. There was a storm over the Saturnalia, a ring of dark clouds that cracked and scarred with lightning. Nylea was already there, her fingers dipping into the sea, watching with fascination.
“Newt?” She turned towards him. “Come look.”
The tree was covered in ice-blue blossoms. The teardrop jewel had sprouted into azure vines and enormous flowers, each one bristling at its center with pure white pistils that filled the air with sweet pollen. Enormous golden beetles prowled the lower reaches, killing off parasites as they came to feast on the godly nectar. At the base, the roots mingled with a city of molten bismuth, rising into block stone formations covered in spirals of opal-metal rainbows.
Within the caves and valleys of the bismuth outcroppings lived small, pink creatures. Newt-folk like Nic, who bathed in the pools formed by dew dripping from the upper reaches, who fought with the beetles to harvest their meat and shells—and the bravest of them would climb all the way up to cultivate in the nectar pools of the flowers, experiencing nirvana as they submerged themselves into the cleansing power of the dew.
