B6 Chapter 696: Through the Jungle (Patreon)

The following week was a whirlwind of activity. Kaius and his team raced through the jungle like a wildfire, ripping through beasts and snatching every scrap of valuable material they could. Day by day, a frenetic mania overtook them, the pressure of the looming Proving pushing them to move faster, fight harder, and spend every spare minute they had honing their Skills in preparation for what was to come. 

It was easy to find things to fight, Gold essence beasts practically rained from the sky here. What was harder was taking the fights they were confident wouldn’t get them killed if a lurking beast decided to take a chance at them when they were bloodied and spent. Even still, it was a rare day they didn’t get into at least two battles as they roved the desert-jungle, bouncing from sealed-off ruin to sealed-off ruin. 

It was brilliant training. Already, they rocketed up towards their next Skill evolution with enough of a pace that Kaius thought they might actually make it in the remaining week before the Proving, even with their experience requirements sharply increasing with every level and their progress slowing down. 

That little issue still frustrated him — it seemed the latter half of a tier always came slower than the first. Kaius knew that they were scaling better than the creatures around them, which allowed them to take on stronger and stronger creatures as they leveled. All that achieved was their levelling slowing down a little less than it otherwise would. 

Not that it was all bad. On the second day of their maddened rush, he’d crossed the three-hundred barrier for his Glyph of Felmenia, granting him access to another second tier spell for his mobility glyph. It had been a tough choice between two spells, but in the end he’d settled on Steps of the Rippling Heavens. It was a celestial and weather affinity spell that drastically enhanced his speed and let him run on the air for fifteen minutes, with every step leaving a disk of rippling mist in his wake. Critically, he could cast it on others — a fact that made him pick it over a true-blue flight spell that cost one-thousand mana to Heaven’s thirteen-hundred. 

With it, he could easily grant Porkchop the vertical mobility he’d sorely lacked up until this point. It was a little expensive to use on him every fight — but by the gods had it come in handy when some High Gold eagle decided it wanted to try and snatch Ianmus out of the canopy. 

Plus, it would save them a lot of time and mana if they ever had to scale one of the plateaus again. The spell wasn’t cheap, but he could cover a lot more distance than he could with the same mana invested into Shunt, or even a Fractured Warp. Let alone the fact it would save him from having to carry a literal ton of meles back down again.

If their days had been consumed by roving banditry against the native essence creatures, their nights had consisted of quiet dedication to cycling for as many hours as they could spare. Bit by bit, their collective progress towards the next stage of Refinement had grown — and then stalled as they had hit the bottleneck one by one.

It was immensely frustrating, and none of their experimentation had proven fruitful. Kaius had no doubt they were doing far better than they would have without compressing their essence into a tight, fast moving ring. The discovery they’d made using the blessing of the Wellspring wasn’t quite cutting it anymore, though — even with the advantage of the environmental essence pressure spurring their internal generation. They’d tried braiding the flow, shaping it, and a dozen other ways of forcing their essence motes to soak into their pillars. Nothing had worked. The damn things were like solid steel, so saturated that it took an age to complete a single revolution to almost no effect.

If they stuck at it for literal years, they might be able to do it with incremental progress alone, but Kaius found that about as palatable as tasting the muck he’d scraped off his boots. There had to be another method! Unfortunately, it was seeming increasingly more unlikely they would find it before the Proving came. 

Instead, they had shifted their focus to keeping an eye out for Treasures. Ones for Refinement had to exist — they’d already found similar ones that helped with Aspect formation, and they’d definitely heard rumours of all sorts of Treasures back in the gate town. 

So far, they hadn’t had the best luck. They’d found a cluster of Stat Fruit that increased all of their Constitution by a measly twenty points, with a few left over they could sell, but that was it. Twice, they’d sensed a tantalising rush of energy wafting out of the ravines between the shattered mesas that scattered the desert, but those had been as wise a choice as swimming after siren song. Far more dangerous creatures than simple Golds lurked in those shadows.

As they rushed down yet another winding route through the canopy in their endless quest towards the centre, Kaius did his best to let go of his frustration. Sure, it wasn’t nice to be stuck right at the cusp of the last stage of Refinement, but their efforts had born fruit. They were growing stronger, and they were getting better at facing off against essence creatures and hostile Authority with every battle — both things that would be vital for the trials ahead.

All of a sudden, Kenva came to a screeching halt at the head of their group, kicking up a spray of bark as she dug her feet in.

“Do you sense that?” she said, pointing off far to their left.

Kaius frowned, taking his hand off the hilt of his sword. He focused on what his friend had found, but couldn’t feel much. Despite having a great ocular Skill, his raw senses weren’t quite as sharp as Kenva’s, or even Ianmus’s, given that both of them had a more focused suite of General Skills.

There might have been a faint charge to the air, but he was struggling to tell if he was imagining it, considering there was so much mana and essence woven into the fabric of the Shardworld already.

“I do,” Ianmus confirmed, closing his eyes and tilting his head. “Essence, I think. A bit of mana as well. I can’t really tell the affinities, but it feels a bit like a Treasure…” He paused for a moment, frowning. “Is it getting stronger?”

Kaius had his mind made up the second he heard the word Treasure. They adjusted their course, cutting through the trees as they honed in on the energy his friends had felt. 

It didn’t take long for Kaius to sense it for himself. It was a dense, prickling sensation — like he was holding an unstable formation close to his skin, or the charge of air right before a storm. Definitely a Treasure — but he struggled to make sense of it. In terms of quality and potency it was similar to most of the other tier two Treasure’s he’d encountered — but in terms of volume? It was insane! They’d been travelling for half an hour and they still hadn’t found it. The thing had to be immense, for them to be able to sense it from so far away.

“That’s not necessarily a good thing,” Porkchop pointed out when he mentioned it. “If we can sense it from this far away, that means everything else can too. We’re not the only things in this jungle that like eating Treasures.”

Kaius just frowned and drew his blade in preparation. 

Before long, Porkchop was proven right as they ran into a veritable migration of jungle life. Scarlet parrots flitted through the branches, wing to wing with moss-feathered eagles; swinging beasts loped from branch to branch, passing right next to glossy insects that leapt between the boughs, and Kaius even spotted a group of glass-shelled tortoises lumbering across the sands below — all heading in the same direction.

The sheer scale of it was immense; just what were they heading into?

“This is going to be a bloodbath,” Kaius muttered as they leapt a gap in the canopy.

His friends looked grim, but no one suggested they stop. The energy was too strong. Whatever this Treasure was, it was potent enough that they had to at least check if they would have a chance to claim it for themselves.

As the leagues vanished, the flow of beasts grew denser. It was eerie seeing so many creatures moving in the same direction without so much as a squabble — it was utterly different from the chaos he’d grown used to in the Shardworld, and just a little too similar to what they had seen with the Tyrant in Deadacre.

Ten minutes later, they skid to a halt on one of the lowest branches of the interlocking canopy, staring in shock at the source of the potent energy.

A sprawling oasis of sapphire blue waters stretched across the desert below them, large enough it was better described as a lake. Soft blue light pulsed below the rippling surface, building slightly in intensity with each cycle. Kaius couldn’t even believe it was there. The thing was large enough that it would have been easy to see from the plateaus above — if not for the four jungle giants that grew scattered out of the water itself, shielding it with their widespread crowns. 

Every spare stride of the waters’ bank was crowded with beasts of every type Kaius had seen to date, from flitting birds as big as his fist, to gargantuan twin-headed asps curled into tight coils. The only source of uniformity was that they were all in the second tier.

It was a small comfort in the face of enough beasts to level a city. They’d be slaughtered if they went down there and a fight broke out.

“What now?” Ianmus asked hesitantly.

“What do you mean? We go and wait with the rest of them.”

Kaius raised his brow at Porkchop, suddenly questioning his brother’s judgement. He wasn’t the only one.

“By the Matriarchs, I know for a gods’ damned fact you’ve encountered the concept of a bloody watering hole before! Nothing down there is looking for a fight, we’ll be fine.”

“I’m all for working with a creature’s natural instincts, but it feels a bit different when we’re talking about enough second tier beasts that it makes the army we faced at Deadacre look a bit sickly in comparison,” Kenva muttered.

“We’ll be fine! We’ve just gotta project our strength and Authority and most things will get right out of our way. I’d bet we could get right to the banks.”

“You’re sure they’re not going to care that three quarters of us have thumbs and walk on two legs?” Ianmus asked, still staring at the crowded banks.

“They won’t if I make it clear we’re just there for the water like the rest of them.”

“And how exactly will you do that?” Kaius asked.

“Would it shock you to learn that beasts can understand beastspeak? Well, they will if I do the equivalent of speaking really slowly and using single syllables." 

Could they really trust that? Kaius eyed the stampede waiting to happen, before he turned his attention to the waters of the oasis itself and analysed it.

Oasis of the Righteous Soul:

Heroic - Tier II

Affinity: Soul, Essence

Fat from the quintessence that oozes from the Blushing Heart, life-giving waters rise from the dead sands.

An oasis packed with energy beneficial to progressing various stages of the Path, directly fueling growth. Matures once in a century.

Natural Treasure (Environmental)

Kaius read the notification, then glanced at the bursting banks. He sighed.

“Let’s go.”