Stress is not good for my rhyming skills. I feel my mental strength dwindle as the qi surrounding us strains at the fabric of reality. My stomach does a few flips as gravity fights with the concept of air resistance on whether or not we should speed up or slow down. Rhea’s arms hang over my shoulders, and I bend my knees slightly to prepare for impact.
My feet touch the ground, and I explode what little qi I have left downwards to forcefully absorb the impact. Four metres. I am standing in a crater four metres deep. Dust, clumps of grass and dirt clods are flying everywhere. Attaching her arms to my chest with a few bands of qi takes up a lot of my dwindling reserves. I grab her legs and feel relief as my fingers sink into firmly muscled flesh covered by smooth skin. A scene of a writhing blob of dripping dragon running over my body to the ground plays out in my mind, and I forcefully repress the image.
I check on the dragons above me and see the red glowing form of the first dragon expanding. The trio has slowed down, and they are working to gain height. The other two dragons are brown and grey. Fire, earth and metal? That explains why the explosion seemed so dense.
Focusing back on the problem at hand, I hold on tight to the unconscious female form piggybacking me. I breathe in mana and feel a trickle of power flowing into my cores. I use this small smidgen of power to cloak us both in a stealth field and begin testing my legs. My first steps are unsteady as I feel some more muscle fibres tear. Then, I properly distribute the weight over my legs and walk out of the crater.
I duck my head in a subconscious gesture as three dragons fly overhead. The wind on my back helps me to start running, and I take off while breathing in big lungfuls of air. I keep my hyper-vigilant state going as I move towards a group of trees a few kilometres away. The dragons overhead start circling the area while tilting their heads as they scan the ground. I feel their gazes sliding over me a couple of times, but none stick. My hiding skills honed over decades of sneaking around are still as useful as ever.
Entering the forest calms me down a great deal. Having overhead cover to hide from the flying overgrown lizards allows me to drop the stealth field and I do so the moment I enter the green cover. I don’t stop moving yet. I keep walking as my legs start to tremble from the pain and damage. The weight on my back would normally not be a burden, but I have very little energy left to spare.
A minute of walking later, I lay myself down on the grass at the base of a random tree. I roll from under the weight and sit up. I take a look at Rhea, something I avoided doing so far. The backside of a naked and flawless example of female perfection greets my eyes, no wounds visible. Unfortunately, I feel too exhausted to become excited about it. Her breaths are very shallow, and they are not getting any deeper.
Placing a hand on her back, I seep my augur into her. My eyes grow wide at the state of her being. She seems perfectly healthy at first glance if a little pale. That changes when I take a look at the state of her cells though. Every strand and fibre of her being looks like it has been partially put through a blender. Each cell wall and cluster of DNA is damaged, every single part of her body dying in some way.
Let’s see. She lost around a tenth of her body mass in dragon form? No, that is correct when I only take her body into account, she lost an entire wing. So, around a sixth? That seems about right, every single cell of hers has around a sixth of its contents violently mixed up. She will be dead in five minutes. I can feel her organs slowly failing as her general metabolism grinds to a halt.
Shitshitshitshitshit.
Stop that, focus on solutions. Damage done to her dragon form must have been evenly distributed to her human form when I forced her to change. I might be able to keep her alive if I had all my qi right now. That’s a problem because I am near empty. I find my face in a deep frown. I know what I must do, but it will suck a lot. Let’s hope I won’t end up killing myself. I make a plan for the next few hours and scrawl that across my mind in massive, impossible to ignore letters.
With a resigned sigh, I start. Nature, fire, earth, metal, water, air, light, and dark. Those are all the mana elements I can link to emotional states. I hesitate once more but firm my resolve as I make sixteen small compartments in my mind. I fill each one with one of the linked emotions. I feel my face slacken into a dead mask as my emotional core freezes up. All the emotions I had swirling through my mind are now stuck and locked up inside those small processes.
I let out some of my remaining qi and spread it thin through the surroundings. Then I use the sections to start attracting mana from around me. The layer of qi guides the colourful strands into my mouth. They pass through my body and into my braincore. It is a good thing I already have a plan in motion, without those predetermined steps, my cold and dead mind would just have walked away from this mess.
I use the qi to reinforce Rhea’s body, releasing control of the qi once it forms an even layer through her form and guiding the power into a passive supporting role. I see her degradation slow as the cells grow stronger while they keep falling apart. I sit there, not thinking, not feeling for at least half an hour, my eyes dead and my heart even more so.
The moment her cells stop degrading, I mechanically stand up and slowly put her on my back again. I mentally mumble a stealth field around myself. The mana keeps flowing into my mouth as my locked-up emotions keep attracting even portions of the simple energies. Woodenly, I begin walking towards the tower.
Step after step, I keep on going. Half of the qi I generate now is used by me while the other half goes towards keeping Rhea stable. The walls of Tower city slowly come closer. I don’t feel any excitement at this. I don’t even feel bored. I don’t even feel nothing. Instead of an emotional vacuum, it is as if I never felt a single thing in my life. Any emotional memories are now alien and unknown to me.
I look up to the broken top of the dungeon. My apathetic eyes see black lines running down from the top. The entire top part of the Tower seems odd, but I can’t care. I keep walking, following the plan that is constantly visible in my mind’s eye. Mechanically, I jump over the wall when I reach it and plop down in the city proper.
Everything inside the city gets ignored. I don’t see the lack of people on the streets. The occasional burned down house gets none of my attention. I only know that I have a plan to complete and nothing else.
Mechanically, I step across molten patches of cobblestone until I reach the dungeon’s base. Some of the qi I gained gets applied to my feet. A suction force pulling air from between my feet and the tower gets generated, as that is what the plan tells me to do. None of the qi actually touches the Tower, so none of it gets lost. Only the physical effect it generates is used to walk up the white side.
Once again, I perform step after step. I deactivate the qi formation around my shoes, and I place one foot half-a-metre higher and I re-activate the formation. With a sucking plop my foot sticks to the smooth surface, and I do the same with my other foot. Step after step after step.
I avoid the black streaks of molten… something, that appears high up. Black splatters of material are stuck to the structure like molten wax. Long, thin rivulets of the stuff appear with higher frequency as I reach the top, looking like a massive melting candle. I notice that this material caused the Tower to look dirty from far away, but I don’t give a damn. Slowly, I move across the smooth, molten surface of the Tower until I reach its top.
I see a white circle surrounded by black material. Dazedly, I notice that there is a rule about investigating unknown stuff, so I probe the black, hard substance with a bit of augur. Molten, oxidised metal and rock. Fire, earth and metal. That combination sounds familiar, but my ability to care is keeping Rhea alive right now.
I move towards the pristine white circle with measured steps. The next step is to place my necklace inside the formation. I get recognised, and I’m let through. The black material has heaped up around the spinning circle, so I step down to the bare white floor. I let a single female leg go and pull the black necklace over my head. I throw
it towards the centre where it hangs, the chain circling around it in a rhythmic motion.
Two more steps to go. My eyes are devoid of life and set on the pendant. I move through the portal. Tree strains a bit, but the enormous quantities of qi now at its disposal prevent any damage from being done. Not that I would have cared. The last remaining step is to remove those processes? Can it all be over then? I just want to stop.
I don’t want to die, but this blankness in my mind just needs to stop. I don’t even bother keeping myself upright as I delete the processes. My form crumples to the ground as I once again feel something, relief at it all being over.
Chapter twelve
Bare
I just want to sleep. My mind is a mess. I feel nothing and everything at once.
Forcing my eyes open, I notice that I’m inside Tree. It’s golden branches and leaves shield me from the smattering of suns. I find myself stuck on a small patch of grass covered dirt. The small clearing is surrounded by tumbling debris. Massive chunks of stone and clumped dirt tumble alongside a myriad of small trees and loose blades of grass. I spot my castle, the student’s houses, the library, the garden, and part of the lake untouched. Half of the neatly sorted loot is also busy spinning randomly through space.
This is quite a mess. Tree is glowing golden as it maintains a shield around itself and the nearby structures. Its lack of qi must have loosened its grip on the surrounding lands, causing them to disintegrate. I feel like I have to apologise to the poor thing, but the way I currently feel, I want the world to apologise to me.
With a start, I look down. I feel relief as I see her breathing still. I also feel anger, jealousy and am creeped out. The next moment I feel boiling rage and utter depression. Shit, I knew that fucking with my emotions was a bad idea. I decide to distract myself from the roiling mess inside my head by focusing on Rhea.
I breathe in the qi rich air while reaching for the naked lady. I freeze up as I realise that I succeeded. There is qi all around me, pretty dense too. More qi than this space ever had. Then I remember the black streaks splattered across the Tower. It looked like someone dumped a whole lot of pitch-black candle wax on top of the white structure.
The memories of that time seem very faint and send chills across my spine. I also remember finding that the black stuff is made from molten and burned metal and stone. Fire, metal and earth. I want to beat the ever living fuck out of that trio. First things first though.
Rhea is stable. Her cells are all shot to shit, and she isn’t getting any better. The qi inside her body is keeping her alive, but not by much I can fix it, her human form is basically a normal, extremely mana-sensitive human, with the exception of a small, additional organ just under her heart. I recognise it as a miniature version of the transformation lock.
I turn around and walk away for a bit. My mind is still a mess of overactive emotions. My entire body switches from cold hate to incredible lust to exhausting worry. I just wander around for a minute or so, moving my body around in order to calm down.
It isn’t working at all. Tears stream down my face while I start trembling at random. I resign myself to my fate by walking back to the still woman. I kneel down beside her in the grass and place a hand on her back. I spread a fine mesh of augur across her body, filling half my mind with Rhea’s physical form. I use the other half to start piecing her cells back together.
At least, that’s the plan. I scratch my head a bit, wondering where to start in this case. It is as if Rhea, lying in front of me, is a horrible victim of radiation. Her cells are partly mush, so I start scanning them to check what parts are damaged. Arbitrarily starting with her muscle cells - I don’t want to make mistakes because of inexperience when working on her brain - I scan them one by one.
A chaotic mess of macromolecules and proteins appear in my mind’s eye. It looks familiar, but I have basically no idea how they work and interact in a healthy cell. I never had to piece back cells like this before. I have studied a lot of plant-and animal cells, but the architecture of this one is alien to me. This task might be a bit much to ask of my fledgling cultivation base. I will need to do this very smart or I’ll be here for quite a long time.
My roiling emotions are not helping either. To be honest, I’m feeling quite hopeless here. The complexity of this project is staggering. I’m stuck on a primitive planet. This entire planet does not even have a millionth of the power the cultivation world had in total. Reaching ascension level was quite difficult there, how am I ever going to do it in such an energy-poor location?
Back on Earth, I sometimes wondered what it would be like to live for centuries and millennia. Normal humans died when they were around 80 in developed countries. Mortals didn’t even tend to live that long in the cultivation world. That time is just the blink of an eye to any foundation realm expert or higher. What is the thinking process of a person thousands of years old?
Well, I found out in person that things tend to stay largely the same. Certain eccentric traits can become more pervasive as people usually stop hiding their true selves after a few centuries of life. I do what I truly want more, though that might have been a side effect of being able to do what I want more because of my growing power.
The negative is that growing truly old allows you to see how truly alone you are. People come and go, and each new face has less impact than the previous. The only one who you can trust - it turns out - is yourself.
Long story short, what I truly feel like doing is not letting the shapely dragon in front of me die. Also, not being alone all the time would be a nice change. I did that for a thousand years, and I got bored of wandering by myself quite a long time ago.
I locked away my emotions in order to start the mana-sucking qi generator. This separated my emotional mind from bodily influence. My mind ignored the hormones running through my brain and ran on cold, dead logic when I walked to the tower. Restoring that connection causes some oversensitivity. So, my brain feels things in a hyperintense manner, which causes my various hormonal glands to try to calm things down by squirting some other mind influencing juice. That causes another overreaction. Ad infinitum.
Seeking some form of escape, I lock away a large part of my mind, commanding it to do automated cellular scanning and repair on Rhea. Then, I just start talking. I focus on what to say next while sensing Rhea being put back together, cell by cell.
⁂
A shining white dragon glides through the sky. Her wings beat with a slow and strong pace as she follows a small figure, running down below. Re-Haan still feels kind of weird, following this guy around for no apparent reason. He told her himself that the three books in her possession are all he has on wind-related knowledge, so she has little reason to keep stalking this person.
Yet here she flies, obediently tracing the man’s hurried path with her draconic eyes. She should be disturbed about this but is somehow totally okay with it now. And that’s because when she inevitably fucked up, it didn’t change anything. The giant storm she accidentally brought down on the entire group’s heads didn’t bring the accusing glances she is used to. If anything, they took it as something interesting, the small girl with short blue hair even looked at her with such sparkling eyes when the downpour started pelting everyone on board, that Re-Haan nearly grinned back at her.
The dragoness looks down, watching the man kilometres down below rush across the plain. A warm feeling washes through her body when she spots him looking up at her for a brief instant. ‘That’s a new one, I felt anger and confusion when I looked at him previously, why do I feel warm?’
Her inexperience with anything like relationships causes her to interpret some of her feelings in odd ways. Dragons only mate with the strongest partner around, and that’s the current head dragon most of the time. His children then have to wait until the top dragon gets replaced to start trying to make the next generation of dragons. There are some ancient rules and precepts that manage this area of dragon social life, but Rhea never got around to s
tudying those.
The warm feeling is new though, and it’s getting uncomfortably hot. Surely this is not normal? Why do her wings suddenly feel like they might catch fire at any moment?
THUUUD
It sounds like someone hit a big, thick-skinned animal with a big club. A dull boom crashes through Rhea’s chest, starting at her back. Shocked senseless by the blast, she barely registers the fact that she has started falling. The extremely bright flash is gone, but darkness surrounds her before she can regain her sight.
PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN PAIN
Everything is pain. It is like her entire body is Replace with liquefied pain. Every fibre of her being now informs her that she is inside a sea of pure torment. At first, it just paralyses her into inaction. She just lets the pain wash through her as any thoughts are eaten away by the agony.
Just when she suspects that her mind may break in half to escape the pain, she registers sounds. Simultaneously, she finds an anomaly in the searing pain that is now her body. There is an area of less pain slowly travelling across her back. She escapes to that place, focusing all her attention on the single spot of her body that screams of pain a bit less.
The spot moves around, leaving slightly less anguish in its wake. It starts glowing with a soothing and warm light, and she follows it around as it travels through her entire body. Slowly but surely, the agony begins to lessen. What feels like half an eternity later, she finally manages to pay a bit more attention to her surroundings. Words have been drumming into her ears, but her focus was too preoccupied with pain to take notice.
“…quite boring to be honest. I did a lot of reading - multiple rooms filled with books everywhere. My job paid well, so I could afford a big house. I turned it into a large library by the time my memories from that life end. And then I was suddenly in an unknown forest, two extremely familiar but unknown corpses lying beside me.”
The Dao of Magic: Book II Page 10
