Path of Dragons 18 - Chapter 15 - Comforting (Patreon)

Just a quick announcement before today's chapter.  I'll be taking the week of October 19-25 off, and I won't be posting any chapters.  This may come as a bit of a surprise to most of you, considering that in all the time I've been posting on Royal Road and Patreon, I've only taken one other break.  That means I've written more than 30 books on here (between this, Death: Genesis, and Mistrunner) without missing a scheduled chapter.  And I'm proud of that.  But this break comes on the heels of a really hectic couple of months for me.  Mostly, it was because I recently moved, but there were a bunch of other factors (like my niece getting married) that contributed to the chaos.  Either way, I need a break, and my backlog won't support continued posting while I recharge.  So - I'm pausing chapters for a week.

For those of you who consider reading Path of Dragons part of your routine, I apologize!  I'll get back into it on the 26th, and everything will go back to normal.  Whatever the case, that's not happening until next week.  So, enjoy this week's chapters in the meantime.  

Nothing worthwhile could ever be created without pressure.  In nature, that force came in the form of other life, most of which was struggling just as hard to grow, to flourish.  Sometimes, things existed in harmony, but at the end of the day, nature was a brutal thing where only the most well-adapted survived.

So, when Elijah cast hibernate, he fully expected to struggle. 

What he didn’t expect was to fight a war.

The second his roots extended into the ground, he was battered by a thousand different competitors from just as many directions.  Other plants attempted to strangle his roots.  Insects burrowed into his trunk.  Vines choked his branches and the very atmosphere threatened to batter him into submission through sheer pressure.

For a second, Elijah felt like he’d been cast adrift in an ocean of conflict. 

And yet, the shape was built to withstand such forces.  It was a titan amongst trees, a veritable god of its kind.  Just as the World Serpent claimed the void, so too did the Shape of Trees hold dominion over nature. 

But no king ever ruled without conflict.  Ever were there others who wished to bring him low, to supplant him.  So it was with the Shape of Trees. 

From the outside looking in, the battle no doubt seemed passive.  There were no great flourishes.  No clashing blades.  No powerful spells.  Instead, it was just unadulterated growth. 

Then, there was the Call.

As its name suggested, it sang such a pretty and inviting song.  All Elijah needed to do was surrender, and he could live the rest of his long life as a god-like tree.  Perhaps he could spread his branches and roots, just like the World Tree.  Maybe he could one day supplant it. 

It was tempting.

Oh so very tempting.

Especially with his mind so fragile. 

Just as the local wilderness hammered Elijah’s physical form, so too did the Call repeatedly slam into him.  He shook, the budding ecosystem of his mind trembling under the immense pressure.

Elijah’s first instinct was to simply endure.  His mind was purpose-built to withstand such a force.  However, he also knew that he couldn’t do that.  Cultivation was not a passive endeavor.  While he might reach the next stage like that, he would never attain the peak of his true potential.

So, even as Hibernate took hold, he opened himself up to the local ethera.

Normally, it came into his cultivation system through the apertures of his mind.  However, with it in such a state, that just wasn’t possible.  Thankfully, his body and soul were capable of picking up the slack.  Doing so for too long would inevitably rupture something, but for now, he could handle it. 

Vaguely, Elijah was conscious of the passing days.  As a tree, time was already difficult to gauge, marked only by period of sunlight and darkness.  He experienced them like a human might experience a few minutes. 

With Hibernate, it was worse.

His thoughts were sluggish.  No less powerful.  In fact, they might’ve been even stronger than before.  However, they moved like tectonic plates.  Slow.  Steady.  Inevitable.  It wasn’t what most people thought of when they considered the process of hibernation.  Usually, that ended with images of bears sleeping the winter away.  That was wholly inaccurate, both in terms of ursine hibernation and what Elijah felt as a tree.

Bears didn’t actually sleep during the winter.  Instead, they entered a state of torpor where they were alert enough to react to threats.  Female bears could even give birth and nurse their young during hibernation.

That was to say that they weren’t wholly asleep. Instead, they occupied a state between consciousness and unconsciousness while their bodies went into energy conservation mode. 

Something similar happened with Elijah.  However, if anything, his body became even more active.  His leaves grew more vibrant, his bark more durable, and his internal processes far more efficient as he absorbed magnificent flows of ethera. 

The only detriment – as he thought of it in his current situation – were his slowed thoughts.  Even that could be a boon, given the right circumstances. 

What’s more, Elijah could feel something he hadn’t experienced before, except in very small doses.

For every subjective moment, he received a small trickle of experience.

At first, he didn’t even recognize it.  But after a while, he saw it for what it was. 

Everyone got experience for doing whatever their class specialized in doing.  Due to the combat bent of his class, the bulk of Elijah’s progression had always come from killing other creatures.  Yet, he could have existed entirely peacefully and still made at least some progress.  At times, he’d imagined spending his years wiling away in his grove, tending to it the same way Nerthus did.

How that would affect his mental state aside, Elijah could have gained levels like that.  Doing so would have grossly affected his class, but he could have managed it.  He’d even been offered an ascendent class that would have doubtless focused on such a life.  Bloomwarden was a powerful option, but Elijah had ultimately chosen a different route because he didn’t want to live that kind of life.

Whatever the case, the trickle of experience  he received just for existing as a tree was no more than that – a tiny amount.  But it was constant enough that Elijah knew that he could enter a state of hibernation and wake up ten years later having gained a few levels.

Did he want to do that?

Not at all.

And at the moment, he couldn’t focus on the implications, given the state of his mind.  However, Elijah still filed the information away. 

Instead, he concentrated on the task at hand, redirecting those vast flows of ethera toward his mind.  It was like washing his mind’s fledgling ecosystem in a monsoon, though one that Elijah could control to some degree.  He pushed everything to absorb as much ethera as possible, and when each integrated piece could hold no more, he slowed the flow to a relative stop. 

Once his mind had absorbed and processed the extra ethera, he repeated the process.

Over and over again.

Time seemed to simultaneously stand still and fly by in a flash.  Elijah became increasingly detached from the very concept, focused as he was on the process. 

In the past, Elijah’s cultivation had revolved almost entirely on his ability to deal with pain.  With this particular aspect, that just wasn’t the case.  There was some pain, though it was mostly just residual from clearing out the detritus left behind by his emotional trauma.  And as a tree, those things mattered increasingly little.

Elijah could feel himself growing more detached by the passing day, though he struggled to muster the ability to care.  It was more like he was watching a disaster from afar.  Or looking back on it from the future. 

His metaphors struggled to keep up with his feelings.

One thing that was certain was that he knew that his time as a tree couldn’t last forever.  Eventually, he would need to cancel hibernate and return to his natural form. 

The thought had begun to frighten him.

As a tree, he was strikingly comfortable.  The notion of resuming his human shape felt almost like body horror.  All those fleshy bits?  Moving from here to there?  Talking?  It felt increasingly alien.

Yet, Elijah held firm in his resolution to return to his natural form.

On paper, that probably seemed obvious.  But in the thick of it?  It was anything but assured. 

Gradually, the nourishing cycles of ethera bore fruit, and his ecosystem firmed.  It was still in its nascent stages, and it was anything but complete. However, it became more real with every passing cycle. 

And Elijah’s mind grew accordingly.  At some point, the diffuse cloud of his identity settled into something more permanent.  Still shifting, like the atmosphere upon which it had been based, but that variability didn’t rob it of its meaning.  He wasn’t just a man.  Nor was he only a dragon.  Not a tree, either.  And certainly, he wasn’t a beast.  Instead, he was all of those things, all at once.  He was also each individually, and in a way he couldn’t really articulate. 

Despite that seeming contradiction, it worked. 

That was supported by the structure he’d chosen for his mind.  He didn’t want to be any single thing.  Rather, he wanted to be the ecosystem that fostered each aspect of his identity.  That was much stronger. 

And far more versatile.

As befitting a tree, the final solidification of his mind cultivation didn’t happen suddenly.  It wasn’t a violent shift, as had occurred with some other aspects of cultivation. Instead, it was more like a gradual settling into its rightful place.

Like lying abed and finally getting comfortable after a long and arduous day’s work.

It was so comfortable that Elijah might’ve remained a tree for good, had it not been for a system notification flashing before his inner eye.

Congratulations!  You have cultivated an Amethyst Mind!

That pulled Elijah out of his tree-ish slumber better than anything else could have.  Before that moment, he’d been content to keep going indefinitely, but that message reminded him that the world existed outside of his little bubble.

Forcefully, he pulled himself out of Hibernate.  It wasn’t easy.  Like pulling himself out of that comfortable bed he’d previously used as a metaphor.  But he managed it all the same, in no small part due to his recently advanced cultivation. 

As he emerged from Hibernate, he was once again stunned by the breadth of nature within Silvara.  However, it wasn’t nearly as overwhelming as it had been before.  The Call remained, everpresent as it was.  Yet, its hold on him had lost some of its grip.  Elijah slipped free and cast his senses wider.

That was when he got his first surprise.

There were animals living in his branches.  Just a few birds and squirrel-like creatures, but a couple were well into the deity tier.  All around him, wildflowers had bloomed into a carpet of color. 

It wasn’t so different from the various times Elijah had discovered natural treasures in the wild.  Except in this case, he was the natural treasure – which brought more than a few disconcerting thoughts with it.

Like whether or not those treasures were sentient creatures in and of themselves? Elijah had never gotten the impression that they were, but then again, didn’t it stand to reason that that was where the World Tree had gotten its start?  Were all those mushrooms and flowers just as sentient as their guardians?  What about the rocks and other non-living natural treasures?

Did Elijah simply not have the capacity to perceive what they truly were?

Ever since the very beginning, he’d taken the protection of guardians as his duty as a Druid.  But what if his perception of that duty had been too narrow?  What if he’d been focusing on only one half of the equation?

The implications were profound.

The hints had always been there, though.  Like when he’d first begun to commune with Treebie.  Or with the giant mushroom in the Empire of Scale.  Or with Fungee.

Where were the lines?

Elijah didn’t have any answers, except to think that those lines were probably a lot blurrier than he’d ever considered.  That was both a comforting and distressing thought, and one he wasn’t entirely certain how to confront.

In any case, Elijah forced himself to let Shape of Trees go.  In doing so, he disturbed the animals who called his crown home, which sent them scurrying or flying away.  A wave of intense vertigo – both spiritual and physical – washed over him as he resumed his human form.

He fell to his hands and knees, gasping for air as he attempted to adjust to his new form.  No.  Not new.  His natural form.

Asserting that came quite a lot easier than it had before he’d reached the Amethyst stage of mind cultivation.  But that wasn’t to say that he did it without issue.  Still, better was still just that – better.  One day, he would advance his mind cultivation to the point where he could assume the tree form as easily as he shifted into any of his others.

“Congratulations are in order,” came a voice from nearby. 

Elijah didn’t need to look up to know that Kor had come to him.

“How long was I out?”

“Seven months,” Kor said.  Anticipating Elijah’s problem, he said, “Do not worry for your companions.  I have watched out for them in your stead.  No harm has come to them.”

That was when Elijah did look  up, only to see Kor’s smiling face.  It was an expression of contentment, the sort that came from a man who truly enjoyed being useful and helping others. 

That that man was a transcendent apsara who had lived for hundreds of thousands of years only made it more poignant.

“Thank you,” Elijah said, meaning both words, and from the deepest parts of his heart.  “I don’t know how to make it up to you.”

“You needn’t try.  The worth of the act is in the doing, not the credit.”

Elijah finally caught his breath, then sat back on his heels. “Fair enough,” he said.  “But I have a question for you, if you don’t mind.”

“I will answer if I can.”

“You brought me here, didn’t you?”

The apsara looked down on him with an unreadable expression.  Then, he said, “I bring many wayward creatures here.  You were lost.  I invited you into this realm so you could find answers.  It took you some time to accept my invitation, but I am happy that you did, young Druid.”

“Better late than never, I guess.”

“Indeed.”