14-83. Centered

Elijah floated naked, his eyes closed and entirely at peace.

One month.

That was how long he had to wait until he finally showed the Empire of Scale what it meant to attack the people close to him. Certainly, that had never been Skahan’s motivation. There were political machinations at play that he neither understood nor cared to explore. But Kaela deserved more than to become a pawn in someone else’s game. She should never have been collateral damage.

And Elijah intended to remind them all of the cost of their game.

They very well could have ruined Kaela’s life. And Elijah intended to visit the same cost upon the very tool they’d used to hurt her.

But he had to wait.

And in that time, he needed to continue his training. He had made quite a lot of progress since coming to the Empire of Scale. Both Tura and Birk were formidable instructors, and they had plenty more to teach him. Yet, Elijah knew himself well enough to recognize when he needed a moment to recenter himself.

Thus, one of the reasons he’d found the inland sea in which he now floated.

The salt content was so high that he barely sank an inch into the water. More, it was so caustic that it would have melted the flesh from a mortal’s bones in mere seconds. For Elijah, it only tingled a bit. Like sticking his finger into a fizzy soda.

From what he’d heard, it was fantastic for cleansing the body of impurities, though. The only reason it wasn’t more popular was because it also played host to some truly territorial fish that needed no real provocation to tear intruders to shreds. Even deities avoided the Sea of Teeth.

They didn’t bother Elijah, though.

Being a Druid had its perks, after all.

But he had more than one reason to visit the sea. In addition to needing an isolated location to recenter himself, he also intended to use the solitude to make a choice he’d put off for months.

Because it was a system-sanctioned event, the Tournament of the First Fang granted experience for each victory. The first ten wins had only netted Elijah a couple of levels each. However, the next phase gave quite a bit more, resulting in roughly five levels per fight. And then, the last three had ratcheted that up even more, giving him a little less than seven levels for each victory.

The end result was that he’d gained a total of sixty-seven levels since the beginning of the tournament, putting him at three-fifty-nine. That explosive growth was better than anything he could have managed on his own, not least because he’d blown past the second wall.

Elijah glanced at his status, just to confirm the massive gains:

His growth was unreal, enough that he could feel the difference day-to-day. Because of how quickly he’d leveled, he hadn’t had a chance to fully acclimate to his new attributes. Often, he surprised himself with just how powerful he’d become.

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The Sea of Teeth was just one example of how far he’d come.

There were businesses in Ashakar built around gauging a person’s power and tailoring a training regimen to their abilities. But Elijah had never visited them. After all, he had Birk, who still managed to push him to his limits. So long as that remained the case, Elijah didn’t need hard numbers to quantify his gains.

Though seeing how many tons he could lift would be an interesting exercise, he had to admit.

In addition, he’d begun to realize that his forms affected him more than the attribute bonuses seemed to suggest they would. By this point, a few hundred points was just a drop in the bucket. But even then, his Shape of Spores remained markedly stronger than both Shape Embers and Shape of the Scourge – both of which were significantly more coordinated than the fungal giant.

As far as Elijah could tell, they worked a little like his cultivation, functioning as multipliers on his attributes. The effect wasn’t nearly as strong as with cultivation, but the general theory seemed sound.

Perhaps he would ask Tura or Birk about it.

However, he wasn’t there to bask in the gloriousness that was his status. It was impressive, but ultimately, it was just numbers on a page. Instead, he moved on to the decision that had been plaguing him since the end of the round before he’d achieved his grandmaster soul.

Before Kaela’s defeat.

Before her humiliation.

Before he’d vowed to make Skahan pay.

Elijah took a deep breath, settling himself. It wouldn’t do to let his anger spiral. Not with an impending choice hovering over him. Because at level three-fifty, he’d gotten another opportunity to evolve a spell.

And this was a big one.

For the first time ever, Elijah’s instincts gave him no hints as to which direction he should take. Or rather, there were too many. When he focused on the individual options, he was beset by a tidal wave of emotions and information. The end result of that deluge was that he had no real direction.

Just the descriptions, which seemed pretty straightforward. Not in effect, but in tone.

Guidance. Command. Cultivation.

The first would allow him to steer the roots through subtle adjustments. With the second, Elijah would force the roots to obey his will. And the third would require him to surrender control to the World Tree, to trust it to manage its own roots while he provided the impetus for growth.

Elijah discarded Command. Not because he didn’t think it was powerful, but precisely because it was. He wasn’t so arrogant as to think he knew better than something as ancient as the World Tree. He didn’t. And so, he couldn’t rightly assume control.

Which left Guidance and Cultivation.

The same logic made him eliminate the Guidance option.

Elijah chose Cultivation, trusting that the World Tree knew what it was doing. Perhaps it didn’t. Maybe the choice itself was meant to show him that the World Tree wasn’t infallible. But even if that was the case, Elijah was far from ready to assume that burden. Even if he wanted it, he was not prepared to take it upon his shoulders.

He was barely a demi-god. He wasn’t even a hundred years old yet. And he suspected that even if he reached transcendence, that task would be beyond him. A Druid’s role wasn’t to control nature. He wasn’t meant to guide it. He was meant to protect it, to give it the chance to blossom of its own accord.

As far as Elijah was concerned, his position relative to the World Tree was similar to how he intended to approach nature. It was bigger than him. Acknowledging that was the only way he could become a proper steward.

Elijah started at the length of the spell’s description, which was the longest he’d encountered so far. Roots of the World Tree had already been pretty lengthy, but Root Nexus had added a couple of life-changing effects.

The first was that he could now empower members of his grove to use the teleportation function, though with a much longer cooldown. That alone would absolutely change the balance of power on Earth and show the Conclave that they didn’t have the monopoly they thought they did. However, it also meant that Elijah needed to be careful going forward. Even if a part of him wanted to push them into a corner, doing so would not bode well for global stability.

But he was far more interested in the ability to build nexuses. If his intuition was accurate, that would allow him to attract ley lines to otherwise barren locations.

Like Gorveth.

Elijah didn’t miss that his instincts about the spell told him that using the Root Nexuses would mimic the growth of Treebie. But he wouldn’t be certain until he had a chance to try it out.

Before he could think too deeply on it, he felt something approaching – and fast.

He opened his eyes to see someone hovering over him.

No. She wasn’t hovering. She was floating on a stream of water. And despite himself, Elijah’s eyes immediately drifted down to the thin robe clinging to her form. It left very little to the imagination.

What’s more, Elijah recognized her.

But before he had a chance to say anything, she recognized his wandering gaze for what it was. With a shocked gasp, she clapped one forearm over her chest while her other hand went a bit lower.

Only then did Elijah remember that he was naked.

“Shit,” he muttered, shifting so that his bottom half was mostly submerged. Unfortunately, with the crystal clear water, that didn’t do much to hide anything. What’s more, the water was so buoyant that he kept bobbing, awkwardly revealing a lot more than he would have otherwise liked.

So, he shifted into the Shape of the Primordial Deep, and for no other reason than to preserve his modesty.

Even as he did, he recognized the woman.

Imal na Rosi. Pale skin. Pitch-black hair. And eyes that looked like the ocean.

She screamed.

Before Elijah could say anything, she flew away on a jet of conjured water. Elijah pursued, and with his massive flippers and power attributes, he easily outpaced her.

“Why are you running?!” he roared. “You snuck up on me!”

She shot a jet of water at him, then conjured a cloud artifact to gain altitude.

Elijah wasn’t having that.

He leaped free of the sea, already shifting into the Shape of the World Serpent. In seconds he’d caught up. The cloud artifacts were convenient, but they were a long way from fast.

Elijah circled her, wrapping his two hundred-foot form in a tight coil. She tried to ascend, but the world serpent was a master of travel.

“Get away!” she shouted.

“I just want to know why you’re spying on me! Did someone hire you? Were you supposed to assassinate me?” Elijah demanded.

“Assassinate? You?” she breathed. “You attacked me!”

“I didn’t attack anyone!”

The two went back and forth like that a few more times before they both seemed to realize that neither was the aggressor. A little longer, and it became clear that their meeting was entirely coincidental.

“Well. This is embarrassing.”

“Yes,” she agreed, her eyes still a bit wild. She was obviously afraid of him, and probably for good reason. After all, he’d beaten her in the tournament.

“You come here often?” he asked, belatedly realizing that it sounded a bit like a pick-up line. “Shit. Never mind. Don’t answer that. I’ll leave you alone now.”

“S-sometimes. It’s…it’s one of the few places I can come to be alone. Could, I guess.”

“I’ll leave you to it, then. I won’t bother you out here anymore. Good luck with whatever you’re doing here,” he said. The logical assumption was that she intended to cultivate. For a water mage, it was probably very well suited for that.

“T-thanks. I…good luck in your match. Skahan deserves to be humbled.”

“I’ll do more than humble him,” Elijah promised, the thought of the dragon cutting through his good mood. “Good luck again.”

And then, he slithered away, refocusing himself on the task at hand.