The Dao of Magic: Book III

by Andries Louws

  Selis dodges the swirling gout of flame bursting from one dragon while reflecting a beam of pure white light with a large shard of ice. She doesn’t throw the sharp ice shuriken’s or large ice splinters she has been practising so much. Instead, she’s making use of large supercooled globs of water that solidify on impact.

  Ragni does very little damage, instead flitting through the chaotic mass of fighting dragons, using the gems embedded in her clothing to grind down sharp claw and teeth to blunt stubs. Enraged roars and fierce breath attacks only hit empty air as she swings around the rocky slopes using long ribbons.

  “That’s enough. Angy, please wrap ‘em.”

  “Yosh! PLAAAANTS!” In response to Re-Haan’s tired voice, Angeta explodes with green power. Then the sea explodes in turn, green stretches of seaweed and slender trunks of unidentifiable plants covering the slope at high speed. The All-Dragon bites at the ice encasing his tail. He barely manages to get free and tries to run, only to be wrapped up by plant and stem.

  The other dragons are transformed into wrapped bundles as Angeta sits down with her eyes closed, green light gushing from her form as a comfortable seat of greenery forms under her butt.

  Selis sighs in return. “Did you have to ruin the fun already? Look at Bord, he’s having the time of his life! The poor boy can’t get his rocks off with anything else besides food and fighting, and he’s already fat enough…”

  Re-Haan lands elegantly on the stilling weave of plants, dragon wings extending out of her back. She bops Selis on the head, wiping the playful pout from the girls’ face. “Look at the mountain.”

  “Ah, yeah, good thing you stopped it…” The faint blue wave of qi that Selis sent out at Re-Haan’s admonishment tells her a story of crumbling stone and total chaos inside the tunnels. Re-Haan walks on, smiling gently as she walks by a rather elderly looking dragon who looks around bewilderedly.

  “Hello, uncle. The Dungeons must truly have stopped giving for you to be involved in a fight.”

  “Ha-ha, little one. You are full of surprises as always. Again, thanks for the gift.” The aged dragon nods at the thin band of metal stretching around a single claw.

  “Let’s catch up in a bit,” she replies. Then, she murmurs in a softer tone, “And Drew called me crazy for requesting the size change feature. Not everyone thinks of keeping items inside their body while transforming. They all would have lost a digit…”

  Bord and the large dragon are still fighting. Or at least, trying to fight. The largest mass of greenery passed the small fighting dragons by, speeding towards the large earth dragon. The dragoness in partial human form walks past the bundled-up dragons, taking extra care to kick the encapsulated All-Dragon a few times as she passes. “Wrap it up, Bord! The mountain is falling apart!”

  “Yes, miss Re-Haan!” he replies. Then Bord moves faster than before and glows brighter as he appears above the large dragon’s head. His flaps jiggle as he plants himself on the large beast’s neck, pinning it to the ground. “Can I keep it?”

  The earth dragon tries to flap its wings, but the plants have taken advantage of its lag in movement long enough to wrap the dragon in multiple layers of green fibre. Its eyes start glowing yellow as its rage grows.

  “Apologies, Ancestor. I had never meant for any of you revered ones to get involved. Please understand.” The growing fury in the large dragon’s eyes falters as he sees the small woman pull a head-sized chunk of greenstone from out of nowhere. She tosses it gently on top of the building-sized head and waits.

  Minutes of silence later - the only sound being the furious and muffled shouting of the All-Dragon - the large being seems to wake. A blinding flash of yellow light later, Re-Haan is confronted by a stately elderly man. Empty green wraps fall to the ground as the air rushes towards the space that the dragon used to occupy.

  “You are one lucky youngling,” he tells her with a piercing stare. The eyes surrounded by wrinkled skin then turn to gaze upwards. Brown hair and a wild beard streaked by grey contrast with the bright yellow robes the stocky man is wearing.

  “How’s that, Ancestor?” asks Re-Haan without taking her eyes off the ancient dragon.

  “Unlike that Maker fanatic over there,” the old man sends a sneer at the trembling form of the All-Dragon, “I’m part of the neutral faction. Had he woken another loyalist you would be but a smear of blood on the mountainside, and the same goes for the fat one.” He turns and presents his arm to Re-Haan.

  She grabs it and they start walking up the mountain. Re-Haan covers her mouth in order to stifle her giggles. “Had I met you before foundation, I’m sure you would have been correct. Now, I somehow doubt it.”

  “Are you requesting these old bones for a lesson, whelpling?”

  “I would never dare to impose on one of your ancient esteem, lest you break your hip.”

  “I see that today’s education has gone to absolute shit. Let me tell you, two hundred thousand years ago the younglings would never have dared question their betters!”

  The two dragons in human form, one a cultivator twenty-five hundred years old and the other many, many times her age, continue walking up the mountain as they chat animatedly.

  “What, they forgot about us, right? Now what do we do with these guys?” asks Selis while poking the All-Dragon.

  “Hey you all, transform into humanoid shapes, please. Your dragon forms are impressive and all, but they suck in terms of communication skills.” Angeta walks through the piles of trussed up dragons like a stern teacher. Bord is sitting on the ground, wistfully staring at the climbing elder’s back. Ragni slinks off, firmly telling herself to stop getting involved in absolutely mad schemes like these.

  chapter forty-nine

  Range

  “Dungeons, the sheer impracticality of that will never cease to make my thoughts grind to a halt.”

  “Shush, you’re one to talk,” replies Tess in a hushed whisper. She and Ket are both crouching on top of a rickety structure. The beastkin capital stretches around them, a colourful city spread over a large collection of islands in the delta of a river.

  “I merely shift qi around in different parts of my brain. I don’t twirl my entire cultivation base around my fingers like a lunatic.” Ket stares at the dagger Tess twirls through the air. He feels the power radiating from the pitch-black item and it makes him queasy.

  “Shush, one of those large-eared guys is looking over here.” Tess peers over the edge, her dagger shifting into a dark cloak that hides her from sight. She continues talking in a tone that’s nearly too soft for Ket to hear. “Have you found any yet?”

  “Nope. I’m pretty sure they don’t have their base in the trash district though.”

  “Hey, that’s a mean thing to say. These guys just use the available materials creatively.” Tess throws an amused smirk at Ket, who keeps shifting on his feet uncomfortably.

  They are skulking on top of a structure that honestly has no business staying upright. Salvaged wood is nailed to chipping marble with improvised metal sheeting. The structure they’re on is one of the highest on this island and sways in the wind precariously. The faint smell of trash seems a permanent fixture in this part of the city where each building is made from thrown away materials.

  “They do look kind of cute, though. It’s a shame we got none of them in Tree.” Tess looks down again, peering at the black-eyed members of the trash mafia caste. The majority of the pedestrians are clad in a mishmash of clothes, the ill-fitting and uncoordinated colours a clear indicator that none of the items they wear are designed to go together.

  “Wearing second-hand clothes? No, thank you. Let’s move on to the next part already; they obviously aren’t here.” Ket shivers slightly while peering down at the unwashed masses. Even when he was but a poor baggage carrier, he refused to do things like that.

  “Okay, let’s move to that one!” Tess points to the next island over, a collection of rising towers with interconnected bridges making a three-dimensional maze.
Each building is made from packed earth and looks organic.

  “Shhh, and okay. Move ahead; I’ll follow. I want to study those pointy-nosed beastkin. They don’t really have a presence outside of the capital.”

  Tess nods, her white teeth shining brightly in the darkness. The black hood she wears shimmers again and wraps her up as she disappears. Ket’s brain hurts at the entire concept of the cultivation system that Tess has developed. He smirks at the feeling, acknowledging the rebellious nature of his own base, and drops metal shavings from his ring.

  He soars through the sky as the tower behind him creaks and groans when he pushes off of it. Ket and Tess have both re-cultivated after returning from the Mana Dungeon delve around a month ago. Ket decided to custom-build something more basic that doesn’t rely on a gimmick like an external calculator. He went with a custom braincore.

  Extensive testing and mapping have led him to develop an adaptive braincore. Instead of storing all his qi in a single spot, he can now move his core around his entire brain. Instead of his previous clean and calculative way of thinking, he has found a full braincore to be a more natural way of reasoning. He has less control over his subconscious but has gained more overall thinking power in return. The madness and disconnect that comes with too much thinking might now only become an issue at higher levels, but his ability to assign automated processes is limited in return.

  Instead, he now can enhance certain parts of his brain by shifting his braincore around. A grin on his face, he does so by moving the majority of his qi to the middle part of his brain. He is still figuring out what each part of the brain does, but he has figured out that stimulating certain parts of his brain enhances certain aspects. The middle part of his brain improves motor coordination and auditory processing.

  The world blooms with sound as his vision dims to mortal levels. Instead, he starts hearing with his ears as each distinct soundwave bouncing inside his ears gives him data. Instead of smashing into the building he is flying towards, Ket gracefully lands. He slinks through the open window at speed, skittering along the floor with an elegant roll, and slides through the furnished room and the door like an acrobatic spider.

  His flowing and coordinated movements are aided by the small clouds of metal sand he uses to push against the floor, walls, and ceiling. Without making a single sound, he runs through multiple cluttered rooms with superhuman grace, jumping out of a window on the other side of the improvised building.

  Soaring through the air again, he shifts his power to the back part of his brain. His eyes start burning slightly as the amount of visual information he receives and processes increases a hundredfold. He looks ahead, glad that he no longer needs to look at the heaps of trash that are the buildings of the island-based city sector still below him.

  Ket had come with Tess at her request. She had badgered the beastkin in Tree until they reluctantly told her of the assassins’ caste loyal to the position of Tooth, whoever might be filling that currently. The mysterious caste is rumoured to consist of fur-covered beastkin with white and orange colouration covered in black stripes. Their mysterious stealth and assassination skills had piqued Tess’s interest and she insisted on searching them out.

  They had travelled through one of the many new portals, this one being placed in a dense copse of trees near the beastkin capital. Large walls and dense guards surrounding all the ingress points had led them to infiltrate through the large city’s least guarded part, the trash caste.

  Glad to no longer be surrounded by the faint smell of rot, Ket lands on the earthen curves that form the island. Placed in the delta of a large river, each caste seems to be based on a different island, each connected through a multitude of bridges. The entire city looks like a painter’s palette, each island a different colour and style of architecture.

  Tess pops out of the shadows next to him as he surveys the densely built warren. Its inhabitants are oddly shaped beastkin, all of them sporting pointed noses, small beady eyes, and small rounded ears. Half of them seem to scurry around on four limbs while the rest walk upright using their naked tails as support.

  “These are cute too,” says Tess with shining eyes.

  “Stop getting distracted. How about this - I’ll go check the central islands and you go explore the other islands? I want to test some stuff, and you can look at all the cute beastkin.”

  Distracted by the swarming groups of small beastkin, Tess nods and waves Ket away. He just sighs and flies off. Tess keeps looking around for a bit before also moving on. Instead of soaring through the sky like Ket, she slinks along the ground.

  Tess also re-cultivated, deciding to go with a changing base like Ket, after some intense discussions. Instead of moving her core around her body, she decided to go with a more changeable concept. Experimentation and training at higher levels of power have led her to catch a glimpse of what her foundation might become. It took her a lot of thinking, but she realized that her elemental affinity for darkness isn’t really what it seems.

  The common belief is that all darkness mages are disconnected and reclusive people, hiding from the world and only emerging to acquire more slaves. This is largely correct, as far as the mages are concerned, but Tess has found that the brightest lights cast the darkest shadows. Although fighting alongside Vox or Ares boosts her prowess greatly if there are shadowed places around, she personally hates absolute dark places and is totally unable to sleep or even feel comfortable in a pitch-black place.

  Instead, she thrives on the edge between light and dark - the place where contrast is highest. Having caught a glimpse of this, she decided to reform her cultivation base around this concept. Grinning at the black dagger that’s once again twirling through her fingers, she wills it into a large cloak. What better contrast than the ability to change the very root of her power into a grain of sand or a piece of fabric many square meters? She embodies the contrast in her body too, allowing her to adjust the amount of qi locked up in structural reinforcement over time.

  The soft cloth that wraps around her is actually her core. Letting the mass of qi merge into her skin, she sinks into the ground while speeding through the edge between the place with only shadows and the real world. She explores the entire island as a dark wraith, moving through the hidden places where the light fails to reach.

  All she finds is deeply dug tunnels, hoards of food, and a rather primitive kind of civilization. Not a trace of the elusive assassins and the techniques she is curious about. Draping her core around her like a cloak once again, she emerges and walks through the beastkin capital, wandering from island to island.

  The outer islands all share a single quality, construction that seems more animal-like than something deliberate. The more she wanders towards the centre, the more the buildings are constructed according to sound architectural principles. Halfway to the central island, the buildings resemble normal villages in a multitude of styles. The more central islands are shining examples of construction prowess only rivalled by the mightiest human buildings.

  She wanders across bridges and through streets for a few hours, trying to catch a glimpse of the mysterious assassins, without success. A sudden sound next to her startles her. Her dark cloak snaps into a sword in a fraction of a second, the only thing stopping her from striking with it being the smirking face of Ket.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Maybe we should spread the rumour that there are humans wandering through the streets. That might attract those assassins.”

  “Stop scaring me like that! I nearly skewered you; and how do we do that?”

  “Ha-ha, skewering. Want to get skewered while we wait?”

  Tess immediately blushes. She swats at Ket who dodges with supernatural grace. “Shut it. Why is it so silent all of a…?” Looking around, she sees every single beastkin present on the streets staring at them. Screams of panic follow as the crowd flees for their lives, screams of “Humans!” and “Slavers!” sounding in every direction.

  “Like that. Come on, I’
ve found a nice bedroom over there.” Ket leers at her while dragging her along. “Not so tough now that I’m able to enhance my body, hmm? It feels great that I can toss you around now.”

  Tess splutters for a bit until the last words register. “Wait, you said you didn’t mind that I was a bit rough our first time. I already apologised for underestimating how strong I was in comparison to a weak braincore like you!”

  “Shhh. It’s fine.”

  “Ah, of course! Now I understand. I was wondering why your physical qi reinforcement is always a tiny bit above mine when we have sex.” Looking as if she just gained enlightenment, Tess grins at Ket, who now sputters in response. “I’m really sorry, though. I would never have been so rough had I known. I mean, you even changed your cultivation base to prevent it from happening again!”

  Having lost on several levels, Ket allows Tess to drag him along, their original goal temporarily forgotten.

  ⁂

  It took him weeks of manipulating and trying, but the mage Fredon has access to the Tree dimension again. The long days filled with nothing but planning, talking, coercing, and planting seeds are now behind him. He glances at the new stone ring around his finger and steps through the portal once more.

  Arriving on the moon, he immediately starts moving. Several components of his plan should be ready for pickup. He even went as far as humiliating himself by taking the test that Database presented him. It took him long days of mental conditioning to get himself in the correct mindset, while keeping his true self unchanged, to pass those tricky moral questions.

  He takes long strides over the white stone of the moon, his exterior facade and thoughts all happy and loving. First, he goes to the small enclave of non-cultivators. The old female beastkin is nowhere to be found, only her dim-witted underlings are present. “Where is Menrah?”