Path of Dragons 16 - Chapter 70 - Iteration After Iteration (Patreon)

Elijah heaved, his entire body coiling under the intense weight of his burden.  Ethera slithered through him, which was more than enough for normal flight.  After all the world serpent was an entirely magical creature, with only a passing connection to biology.  Yet, even his muscles strained before the task.

But he kept at it, inching the Vengeance forward one burst at a time.

It wasn’t like moving the other sky islands.  Those were almost all hollow, to one extent or another.  Meanwhile, the Vengeance was the product of intense earth manipulation, and to the point that its mass was far denser than it had any right to be. 

More than once, Elijah’s tow chains, built by Carmen herself, had snapped.  Thankfully, she’d given him plenty with which to work.  The result was that, with the help of Avatar of Storms, he’d wrapped miles of chains around and through the mountainous ship.  All connected to a harness he wore around his serpentine body.

Now, the hurdle had ceased to be the integrity of the chains, but Elijah’s strength.  Or ethera.  He still wasn’t quite certain which had more of an impact on the world serpent’s mobility.  But one thing was certain – it remained incredibly difficult to move the Vengeance, and to the point where it reminded him of the pilgrimage he’d made so long ago. 

Back then, he’d carried his sister’s statue, which had been repurposed to sit atop the Temple of Virtue across hundreds of miles of desert and other wilderness.  Only a few tons of stone, but at the time, that was enough to tax his attributes.  The vengeance was exponentially heavier, but so was he significantly stronger.

The burdens felt similar, even if the circumstances were wholly different.

Which meant that, as he towed the Vengeance toward Fungee’s island, Elijah adopted a nearly identical mindset.

When he had first returned to Orveth Kaal, he’d been surprised to find that the Vengeance was untouched.  Why had the deities left it alone?  The idea that, in more than two years, they hadn’t stumbled across it, strained plausibility.  However, Elijah soon discovered the truth when he returned to where he’d left it.

At first, he thought it had been taken, but he found it only a few hundred miles away, having crashed into a much larger island.  It was still intact, but his attached forest had grown to encompass the entire thing.  From afar, it looked like nothing so much as a natural mountain covered in trees. 

If one knew what to look for, they could see towers and other evidence of artificiality, but the deities clearly hadn’t noticed that much.  Not surprising.  The scouts probably weren’t looking for a ship.  Rather, so early in the trial, they were surely tasked with finding threats.

A slightly odd mountain wasn’t that, so it remained ignored.

When Elijah entered the Vengeance, he’d found that a few beasts had taken up residence.  To get rid of them, he’d first used Shape of Withering to fumigate the place and force most of the beasts to abandon the ship.  For anything left, he employed Shape of the Reaver, which was perfectly suited to a long and continuous campaign of violence.

That took the better part of three weeks.

After that, he used Avatar of Storms to carve the Vengeance free of its cradle.  Then, he tunneled through it so that he could wrap the chains around the structure.  And finally, he began the trek to the more isolated portions of the ancestral world.

It was slow going, as much because the moving mountain became a target for bestial attacks.  When that happened, Elijah was forced to shift out of the Shape of the World Serpent and go on the attack.  Unfortunately, he only managed to kill a few enemies.  Most of the time, he simply fought them off until they decided he was no easy prey. 

Elijah would have preferred to chase them down, but that wasn’t his mission.

The downside was that he only got a little experience for quite a lot of fighting.  The upside – if it could be called as much – was that he was able to return to his role as a beast of burden.

As he dragged the Vengeance through the skies, he decided that he was missing some important aspect of being a world serpent. After all, they were known for dragging entire planets into the void so they could nest.  Given that Elijah was struggling with a single mountain, that just seemed implausible.  Clearly, they had some ability that he lacked, and one that he wasn’t certain he would ever obtain.

Still, if there was a Feat of Strength prerequisite for that theoretical ability, then perhaps dragging a mountain across an ancestral world filled with deity-level beasts would satisfy it.

The slow process did give Elijah plenty of time to think, though.  And inevitably, his thoughts settled on the adjusted plan for Orveth Kaal.  When he’d first been stranded, he had vowed to take it for himself.  Back then, the idea had been to use Fungee to colonize the planet while Elijah used the resources for cultivation.

It was a selfish plan.

Now, the idea was to use it to kickstart Earth’s growth.  Not just for the Hartwood Grove or Ironshore, either.  No – once the plan started to take shape, it had spread to multiple settlements.  From Kalki, Anupriya had vowed to bring her best Builders.  From Seattle, a few weapons manufacturers.  And oddly enough, Gunnar. 

Sadie was sending a couple of her Adjudicators, though she wouldn’t be coming herself.  When Elijah had offered to bring her along – via a message – she’d said that she couldn’t abandon Earth. 

He didn’t argue, as much because someone with power needed to stay behind as because her presence would complicate things.

Elijah had also contacted some of his friends from the Empire of Scale, though they’d yet to respond when he headed back to get things ready for the mass migration of Earth’s elite.

There was a lot that needed to be done back on Earth as well.  The easiest part was to gather supplies.  More difficult was acclimating everyone to the increased ethereal density.  For that, they’d copied some of the chambers in the Empire of Scale.  Not exactly, because they couldn’t afford all the expensive materials required to replicate them in their entirety.  But the plans supplied by Kirlissa’s people had been adapted for use on Earth.

Now, they were being used to prepare people for entrance into Orveth Kaal.

At the same time, some of the Botanists, Farmers, Alchemists, and other Tradesmen had begun work on a more permanent inoculation against fungal infection.  After all, Fungee wasn’t really one to hold back.  As of now, Elijah was just about the only person who could survive contact with his spores without ill effects. 

Once, it might’ve been possible for others to endure his environment.  Imal’s first visit had proven that.  But since then, Fungee had grown exponentially stronger, and to the point where even deities would be affected by his spores.  Elijah could take it because of his unique cultivation and resistances, but the members of the grove’s expedition would not have that advantage.

It was not a quick process, though. 

Hopefully, it would be completed by the time Elijah returned to Earth.

He was thankful that travel back and forth was possible, which had been in doubt until he’d tried it.  The only problem was that he didn’t get contribution points while he was away – expected, but still frustrating.  Fungee’s colonization efforts had continued unabated, which should have counted, as far as Elijah was concerned.

When Elijah had checked the satellite caves, he’d found that the colonies were developing nicely.  They didn’t have the benefit of his direct contribution.  No Dictate of the World Tree or frequent infusions of vitality from the Breath of Life.  But they were still natural treasures growing in ideal environments. 

The result was better than Elijah had any right to expect.  However, his plans for how it was all going to fit together had changed considerably.  Until he’d returned to Earth, he had hoped to use Fungee to harness the various landmasses and slowly drag them together.  Doing so would have taken centuries, but that was the timescale he needed to accept for such a project. 

But now?

After consulting Nerthus on the matter, he’d decided to go in a different direction.  His instincts to drag everything together were, in a word, misguided.  He didn’t need to change Orveth Kaal’s nature.  Instead, he just needed to do what he had already begun to do on Earth.

And Nerthus had come through by providing him with hundreds of ancestral tree seeds he’d gathered over the years.  More than that, he had bathed them in the various elements available on the island, increasing their power by a significant degree. 

In short, they only needed Dictate of the World Tree to push them over the edge.

Of course, one of the first things Elijah did after establishing the plan was to use that spell on the original tree at the center of his grove.  The results weren’t as impressive as he’d hoped, but Nerthus explained that was because the ancestral tree was already connected to the World Tree. 

That made sense.

It was a lot like Elijah’s attributes.  Getting the boost early on was much more impactful than if he got it later.  Ten strength after he’d first become a Druid was a lot bigger deal than it was now.

Still, it was a little frustrating, considering that he’d hoped for a larger overall effect.  But in the end, he had no choice but to work with what he had available.  Dictate still made a difference, just not as much of one as he’d hoped.

Eventually, he reached his destination. 

His arrival definitely agitated the local guardian, but Elijah had spent more than a little effort getting the beast on his side.  To do that, he’d resorted to his tried-and-true method of feeding it all sorts of snacks it preferred.  His nature attunement did a lot of the heavy lifting, but the food was what really sealed the deal.

Thankfully, it hadn’t become as restless as the rest of the ancestral world’s wildlife.  Otherwise, Elijah would have been forced to do something drastic – like relocating it.  Or more probably, killing it.  Not his preference, but in the end, he would do whatever was necessary to reach his goals.

That probably made him a bad Druid.  A hypocrite, too.  But Elijah had a well-established blindspot where his own hypocrisy was concerned.  In that respect, he wasn’t so different from everyone else in the multiverse.

Either way, Elijah quickly got to work attaching the Vengeance to the landmass.  To do so, he’d dug a few large tunnels – not infringing on Fungee’s chamber – through which the chains could be woven. 

That took a few more hours until Elijah was satisfied that it was secure.  Only then did he head back into Fungee’s cave to check on the colony.  Oddly enough, Fungee seemed at least nominally happy to see him.  Or rather, he didn’t feel overtly hostile, which was a nice change of pace considering the tantrums he tended to throw after Elijah’s long absences.

In any case, Elijah spent another few days checking Fungee’s progress, and he was happy to see that some of the changes he’d implemented had begun to stick.  The most interesting came from the pillars he’d constructed.  In a lot of ways, they resembled the monoliths he’d built back on Gorveth, but in this case, Elijah had the benefit of dedicated Stonemasons to guide his enchantments.  With their help, he’d devised a few changes that both increased the effectiveness of the runes, but also helped them integrate more seamlessly into the overall design.

It was further evidence that the system tended to favor specialization.

Elijah was good at a lot of things, and he was even better at leveraging the versatility of his class to great benefit.  However, there was no real substitute for specialized knowledge.  Elijah still shouldered most of the load during the design process, but their input helped bridge the gap between good enough and great. 

Finally, Elijah looked at the Ledger, establishing that his efforts had kept him in the top ten.  However, a familiar name topped the list, and not by a small amount of points.  Illska had clearly made her presence known. 

Once Elijah established his little outpost, he intended to find her and the other Vyrins.  But until then, he preferred to remain isolated.  Idly, though, he wondered what the deities thought about his placement.

Surely, they knew his name.  He was famous, after all. 

Were they panicking?

Confused?

Or were they angry?

One thing was certain, though – they had absolutely no idea what was coming.