Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 13 - Turtles All the Way Down (Patreon)

Originally, Elijah had never intended to use his new friend as a cultivation resource.  Shelly was a magnificent creature who had presumably spent her long life in relative peace.  After all, terrestrial turtles were largely herbivorous.  Aside from waging war on the local tree population, she was mostly peaceful. 

What’s more, she deserved the dignity of being treated as more than just a tool for his advancement.  And that wasn’t how he looked at her.  However, Elijah wasn’t above using what was available to him, and he didn’t think Shelly would mind.  There was a good possibility that she wouldn’t even notice his intrusion. 

Yet, he still hesitated.

Partially because he wasn’t really looking forward to the process of cultivation, but mostly because he didn’t want to offend Shelly.  She’d accepted him as a friend, at least inasmuch as she recognized his presence.  Rewarding that by thrusting himself into her mind was a poor payment for her generosity.

Even so, Elijah wasn’t sure how else he was meant to complete his cultivation.  Every moment he wasted searching for the right opportunity was a moment he couldn’t spend keeping his companions alive. 

Was Alyssa correct in her assertion that he had a choice?  Elijah couldn’t deny that she was.  But he also didn’t think the distinction really mattered.  Whether or not he had a real choice was irrelevant because he simply couldn’t countenance the alternatives. 

Besides, Shelly was right there, practically begging him to use her mind as the whetstone that would sharpen his mind cultivation.

So, without further hesitation, he settled down into a comfortable position and took a deep breath.  Thankfully, Alyssa – or the construct he’d created to represent her – didn’t interrupt his preparation.  Instead, she sat nearby, watching and waiting, far more patient than his sister had been during her life.

Finally, Elijah focused on Soul of the Wild.

Immediately, the world exploded into a cacophony of warring sounds, images, and sensations.  Elijah could feel everything, right down to the cells that made up Shelly’s rocky scales.  He could feel the subtle vibrations that came from her chewing a massive tree she’d uprooted a few hours before.  And he could hear the distant sound of an avalanche in progress.  Every movement she made was a geological event, after all.

For once, Elijah refused to shunt those details into their own leaf.  Instead, he bathed in them, letting them overwhelm his mind, one leaf at a time. 

It wasn’t nearly enough to shatter the facets. Rather, the process softened them up, readying him for the true pulverization he intended to subject them to.

For a while, Elijah just sat there, letting everything wash over him. 

And eventually, he acclimated.  Not easily, and not completely.  It was more like learning to live with tinnitus than anything else.  It was always there.  He just learned to let it exist in the background. 

It still took some time, though.  Elijah reasoned it was good for the process, though.  Layering one stressor after another would let him slowly acclimate until he could withstand much more than when he’d started.  More than he could have expected, he thought.

So, he kept his focus on Soul of the Wild, forcing himself to feel everything until, at last, he felt ready to truly enact his plan.  He wrapped the ability in Mantle of Authority, then extended one of his branches downward.  Technically, he didn’t need to do so while sitting atop Shelly’s head, but he reasoned that the brain was where the mind truly dwelled.  So, it couldn’t hurt.

In any case, the second he did so, he was inundated by the breadth of her consciousness.  He’d been communing with the giant tortoise for a while now, but every single time he did so nearly took his breath away.  Her mind was like a vast sea next to Elijah’s pond. 

Or, as he reconsidered, like a piece of driftwood riding the waves of her thoughts.

Briefly, he was treated to a few of her surface level emotions, and they were appropriate to a turtle.  That was to say that they were uncomplicated.  Simple food drive.  The need to rest periodically.  A herbivore’s awareness of her surroundings and potential predators.

Not that Elijah thought Shelly had many of the latter to worry about.

She was a mountain-sized tortoise.  If there was a predator capable of hunting her, Elijah didn’t want to meet it. 

As Elijah surfed along the surface of her mind, he did everything he could to send soothing thoughts her way.  He wasn’t a threat.  He didn’t intend to hurt her.  In fact, he wanted nothing more than to be her friend.

She had already accepted him, at least inasmuch as she acknowledged his miniscule presence.  Vaguely, she had also begun to associate him with shell scratches, which he’d managed by using Shape of the Primordial Deep and Everything is an Ocean, acting something like a giant, circular brush that swept her shell clear of debris. 

Shelly had appreciated that.

The rest of the ecosystem growing on her back definitely did not, with a few creatures even fleeing.  A few more had attacked Elijah, though he had no real issue either avoiding them or defeating the challengers. 

Strangely, they had given him almost an entire level’s worth of experience, pushing him to four-eighty-four. 

It was almost as much progress as killing a half dozen deity-tier dragons, which probably should have alerted him to something odd about the multi-verse with which he was acclimated. 

Or maybe they were just more powerful than the difficult killing them suggested.

Elijah had no idea, and he didn’t really have any way of discovering the truth.  Not until Kor returned, but even that was assuming that the apsara would answer his questions.  There was no real guarantee of that, considering how cagey Kor tended to be.

Regardless, Elijah had no mental bandwidth to consider such things at the moment. Instead, he focused entirely on the situation at hand.  He bathed in Shelly’s thoughts, and with each milestone of acclimation, he delved a little deeper.  Doing so exposed him to even more powerful thoughts, each of which slammed into Elijah’s consciousness like the storm surge in front of a massive hurricane. 

Channeling the demeanor of a tree, Elijah withstood the deluge.  Despite his mixed metaphors – trees and driftwood – he endured long enough to find his footing.  Once he did, he plunged deeper until he was forced to repeat the process.

Over and over, he continued on.

Each layer taxed his mind anew, but it wasn’t until the twentieth or so that he felt his identity begin to erode.  He stopped there, awash in Shelly’s massive presence, as he attempted to reaffirm what should have been innate.  He knew who he was.  He knew what he was.  And the tortoise’s powerful mind would not change that.

Once he felt comfortable enough to move on, he did.

So the psychological journey went, one layer after another until Elijah lost count.  The edges of his identity became frayed, and at times, the tortoise’s thoughts mingled with his, becoming so intertwined that it was briefly difficult to separate one category form the other.

Meanwhile, Elijah’s body remained exactly where he’d left it.

Normally, he wouldn’t have ignored it so completely, especially in such a dangerous place.  However, he felt secure in the knowledge that nothing would harm him so long as he remained atop Shelly’s head.  The other animals never ventured from her shell, and no predators would dare to attack her.

In that way, he was safe.

At least physically.  Mentally, it was an entirely different story. 

Elijah continued to plunge deeper, and when he had a thought to spare, he began to wonder just how vast Shelly’s mind truly was.  He was confident that he’d only scratched the surface.  He could keep going for years and not find the center.

In a way, that was reassuring.  Despite her simple nature, Shelly was still the equivalent of a transcendent.  If Elijah had found a small mind within that vast body, he would have been incredibly disappointed.

Over and over, his mind was pummeled until, at last, he began to break.  Not all at once.  Instead, the erosion metaphor remained intact.  Slowly, layer after layer of Elijah’s mind wore away until only the core remained. 

It was like having his entire nervous system exposed to open air.

That, coupled with being crushed by a building.

Psychologically speaking, of course.

The pressure increased until, at last, Elijah could take no more.  He knew that if he went even a single step more, his mind would be unmade.

So, that was exactly what he did.

He didn’t do so out of hubris.  Rather, he knew just how risky it was.  However, he also recognized that he couldn’t achieve his goals with a weak mind.  Each step of cultivation was a little closer to the ideal, that was true.  But it also built upon the last, like a pyramid.  If the foundation was less than perfect, the entire structure was in danger of catastrophic collapse.

Elijah had no intention of ending his cultivation at his current tier.  He would reach the very top.  And to do that, he needed to push himself every step of the way.  Simply satisfying the requirements to reach the next tier wasn’t enough. Far from it.  He needed to push himself, to reach the absolute pinnacle of his capabilities.  Otherwise, he would never reach the goals he’d set for himself.

No one ever reached tier nine without risk.

So, taking a metaphorical breath to steady his nerves, Elijah pushed deeper into Shelly’s mind.

He knew it was a mistake, at least from a conventional perspective.  While he knew he had a choice – as everyone kept telling him – Elijah didn’t feel that was entirely accurate.  The weight of an entire planet rested on his shoulders.  A grove.   Millions of people. 

He couldn’t afford to sit back and take things easy.

He had to push himself to his absolute limits.  That was what determined his goals, at least as much as a personal pursuit of progression and power.

Whatever the reason, the pressure that came after that fateful decision crushed him entirely.  The core aspects of his mind – where his identity, personality, and the anchor of his spirit dwelled – completely shattered.

And suddenly, Elijah found himself adrift in a sea of Shelly’s mind.

A memory slammed into him, and with enough force to destroy galaxies.  However, the tone of that memory stood in stark contrast to its power.  In it, Shelly was a tiny tortoise, no bigger than a box turtle Elijah might’ve found in his backyard as a child.  She was driven by all the things a turtle found important.  Food, mostly.  Shelter from predators, secondarily. 

Elijah lived in that memory for longer than he could fathom.  He merged with it.  He internalized it.  He became the tortoise.

Then, from somewhere deep within his own consciousness, a rebellion sparked.  He was not Shelly.  He was a Druid. A dragon. A man.

And, at times, a tree.

The force of that rejection tore him free of that memory and sent him plunging into another. 

This one showed how Shelly became something more than a simple tortoise.  In her search for shelter and food, she had found a massive fern that, with the context of Elijah’s experience, was obviously magical.  The fronds glowed with iridescent power, and when Shelly took her first bite, it knocked her unconscious for more than a year.

When she awoke, she was stronger, more intelligent, and quite a bit larger.

She took another bite.

This one, she endured, letting the magic wash over her.  The second bite sent her careening back into darkness, and when she awoke from t hat bout of unconsciousness, she was again larger and more powerful.

So it continued until she towered over the vastly depleted fern.

But she didn’t eat it all, as her instincts screamed at her to do.  Instead, she ate only a frond here and there – just enough to satiate her hunger.  Meanwhile, the fern continued to grow.

Soon enough, other animals attempted to take it for themselves.

That was when Shelly recognized just how strong she had become.  She trampled the intruders under her feet, snapping at them and crushing their bones. 

She was a peaceful creature, but she thought nothing of defending herself.

And so, over time, she became the queen of her stretch of the jungle.  The fern grew with her until it was the size of a redwood. 

Then, the hunters came.

In Shelly’s memory, they were tiny.  Barely more than ant-sized, and she didn’t note their blurry shapes.  She felt the sting of their outsized attacks, though. 

Somehow, she managed to defeat them.

But more came later.  When she beat those, another wave came.  And another after that.

For years, she fought against them until, at last, she was defeated.

In her desperation to survive, she fled the only home she knew.  The hunters hounded her for a while, but she managed to kill enough of them to dissuade their predation. 

Elijah knew they didn’t really want to kill her.  Instead, they just wanted the fern.  Now that they had it, the huge and dangerous tortoise was no  more than a loose thread. 

For a while, Shelly wandered that forest, completely lost and without a home. 

She missed her fern.

She missed the idea of safety.

She missed the life that had been taken from her.

Deeper and deeper she stumbled into the forest until she felt a pull that Elijah recognized.  It was the Call.  More specifically, it was an announcement of a gate to Silvara.

Shelly trekked across the land, swam across the oceans, and eventually, she reached the origin.

Sure enough, it was a gate.

Shelly didn’t hesitate to plunge through.  However, just before she did, she noticed a curious-looking tree.  Shelly didn’t recognize it, of course, but Elijah did.

Kor.

He stood to the side, watching as the tortoise disappeared into the Silvara.  And at last, Shelly knew peace.

Meanwhile, Elijah struggled to reassert his identity.  When he did, he plunged into another memory.  And another after that.  Over and over, deeper and deeper.  Each time he emerged from a memory, he was sharper.  His sense of self was stronger. 

But it was also more brittle.

Elijah knew he was approaching the point of no return, but he couldn’t let himself stop until he was absolutely certain.  So, with only some trepidation, he continued on.