After two weeks on the island, three things of note took place.
The most obvious of them all was that Darak evolved into their second Sapling, a Sapling priest, which meant he picked his specialisation just as Mala did. From the beginning, he was always a person who preferred to heal, both literally and figuratively. In most cases, the latter was no more than to be a pillar for those with personal troubles, traumas, or some sort of warped outlook on life. Very rarely, this healing was in the form of revitalisation of a village, or a broken family hoping to mend, albeit struggling for some reason.
And sometimes, to heal, it was best to cut off the festering wound and allow new flesh to grow.
This method did not work often, but the alternative was to hope such rot remained static or reduced in its own time.
Thus, Darak picked the bloodline 'Inquisitor of Healing’, one which greatly excelled in learning and using all healing spells. But in any case, where something invoked the anger or fear of those without the power to defend themselves, he instead received an equally huge empowerment to all offensive divine spells. Additionally, the bloodline came with a sort of protective film all over his body that grew in power as he healed others.
As a bloodline, it cemented his future status as a healer first; combatant second.
The other good piece of news was that the group successfully hunted their first gold tier beast!
…Yes, the wyvern they killed back in Evelard was also a gold tier. But they only killed it by taking its exhausted and mana-less state, then additionally made use of an overpoweringly strong blade to ground it in the fight.
But here on this island, they fought an adult boar whose height alone compared to Mala, and at least a metre in width. Of course, it didn’t know spells, and its innate abilities were far weaker, but a fresh gold tier with no injuries was killed by their group.
Killed by the five of them without Icy or Raccelline’s help!
It tasted pretty good, and due to its large size, Icy easily ate enough to complete another assimilation. Even better was that he obtained another Rare+ bloodline, although it also meant this boar was at the limit of its current bloodline, unable to grow much stronger without an evolution.
[Assimilated Gigatusk boar bloodline! 4 new bloodline pathways potentially available]
Besides that one, the group also hunted quite a few more beasts with Rare bloodlines, granting Icy four other assimilations besides the gigatusk boar. However, it was the only Rare+ of the lot, and even then he didn’t consider it good enough for anything besides providing bloodline energy.
Even with that happening, they still had two more yet to evolve from the original team.
And then… The spottier fact amongst the group. Icy wanted to trap steel and gold tiers near their evolutions and forcibly mutate them, but it didn't exactly go well.
Jaren naturally brought it up first, not only out of principle but because it bothered him as someone trained to hunt ethically. “Look, there’s really a limit to this stuff. You’ve been feeding these lot for over a week now, and calling this necessary is really…”
But his wavering point wasn’t helping the situation, leading Mala to take over. She calmly said, “While I, of everyone here, understand why you’re doing it this way. There’s really no need to be overly cruel like this. Have you seen their eyes the past few days?” Of course, they all had. He wasn’t blind to the fear the unintelligent beasts showed after a solid week of being impaled and forced to stay alive.
This wasn’t the mountain where he felt just in using an enemy for his own means… And arguing for such morals only became harder.
“Why do you even have to trap them? Not like they can escape the island?” This was Darak’s suggestion, and he simply agreed in the end. But it wasn’t just because he knew this was a rather twisted way of getting what he wanted…
It was the way Raccelline bit her lip when she saw the beasts, and how she frowned in front of his treatment of them.
He didn’t know when it happened.
The beasts were promptly released, albeit with a seal spell cast on their bodies to trace their locations. One gold tier and seven steel tiers in total, yet none evolved in the week and a half since they were captured. From then on, rather than make things tough, he just snuck around the forest and left chunks of his body for beasts nearing evolution to eat. It made them harder to keep an eye on, but the group were far happier with this way of doing things.
Forcibly mutating things is also a tricky thing, but generally for wildly different reasons than trying to gather enhancements for one self.
As for progress in training, things were a mix between interesting and strange. Raccelline learnt another manual, nothing unusual there, although she started actually using her footwork against random steel tier beasts who wanted to attack the undefended child.
To the day, they had yet to see anything land a single hit on her.
Mala learnt spells and received book after book of knowledge from Icy to fill her currently shabby library. Korridan practised some new skills given by him as well, but these were just enhanced forms of the ones he provided back in the mountain range. And Darak found there was surprisingly little to do outside of hunting beasts, requiring a church in the near future to obtain new spells.
And Jaren…
He spent around twelve hours each day for the past two weeks, firing arrows at trees without end. There was no variation or change, except the aiming of his bow, yet not once did he complain about the endless repetition.
In those two weeks, and around 170 hours total, Icy estimated that he fired that bow at least 100,000 times!
In fact, he even claimed to have completed the technique around 30 hours in…
But continued because there was nothing else to do while waiting for the evolution.
Lastly, there was Icy, who made some progress on his heart, but found it far too slow and switched over to soul training. So far, he only learnt the process of this sort of training. And while he wished it was just as easy as sitting in place and casting a spell, it required a constant infusion of elements to begin metamorphosis and growth of one’s soul.
Basically. Element in; Stronger soul out.
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Well, it did also require some magical parts, namely using a spell to maintain the stability of one’s soul while the infusion took place. And if he forcibly infused elements which didn't align with his body’s affinities, it resulted in some degree of pain during the process. Outright conflicts hurt like hell though, and for that reason, very few individuals try to create a soul from all of the four base elements, earth, air, fire, and water.
Before he started on this process though, deciding that his best combination would likely be ice, lightning, wind, and space, he received a prompt from the Nexus. A seemingly random one… But why did it purposely provide one right before he wanted to begin infusing elements?
[An uncategorical anomaly has been noted with your soul. The Nexus has tried to analyse and understand the situation… But the fact alone should be impossible with your soul. For context, it is possible to infuse ‘concepts’ and ‘objects’ into one’s soul instead of elements]
Ah, this was going to be fun, almost instantly recalling how the Nexus lagged behind when his soul awakened. He almost wanted to call over the others and make bets on what the Nexus would tell was wrong with his soul, but kept quiet and sighed gently before flicking to the next box.
[The concept of ‘food’ and object ‘Ice-cream’ have both already merged into your soul. With your current soul, the destabilising factor should have instantly shattered it and killed you]
“Yet it hasn’t… To be honest, it’s somewhat enjoyable to see even the Nexus confused over something.” He’d almost been killed by his body so many times that one more strange problem within him was hardly the end of the world. His sugar-mana heart still stored copious amounts of mana, so who cared if it was sweet?
His snowcone mental space still tasted good, and he had yet to uncover any other long-term ramifications of it. Maybe if some psychic parasite got inside, it’d have the best day of its life with the snow.
The sardonic attitude he mostly hid really grew powerful whenever these things happened with the Nexus.
[While we are glad our concern was not met with panic, there is still no basis on which your soul should be stable right now. Yes, your divinity and bloodline has been accounted for]
That was… interesting. He actually expected it was due to his soul-focused evolution that he was still alive, but for it to be something else entirely?
“I know very little about those infusions… But is it not possible that I was born like this because it was optimal?” It certainly wasn’t a thing he’d have believed in the past, but what exactly worked and didn’t work in nature was a tough question. After reading and learning enough about the world, it certainly seemed that while the Nexus equalised everyone at birth, that did not mean things never changed.
[The Nexus has never found ‘optimal’, however, it is agreeable that this was only possible through some natural process. Whether or not you would die without it is speculation and cannot be analysed]
So he might be dead without the strange infusion, but he also shouldn’t be alive because his soul was too weak to survive such a thing?
That sounded like a great chicken and egg problem.
He asked one more question which changed the near future, “Will it affect how I train my soul?”
[Not until your soul reaches the fully-formed state]
Then there was no need to care. That was two major upgrades away, in which case, he just had to infuse his soul with equal parts of those previously stated four elements until he obtained the first level, Proto-soul.
This level was mostly about building the framework for a truly imbued soul, focused on just stuffing it with elements and literally creating a soul-powered construct around the soul to act as the base. While the defensive power of this level is almost no better than the base, Unformed soul, its offensive abilities were already apparent as any elements infused into the soul could be launched as minute soul attacks.
These shouldn’t ever be depended on to deal reasonable damage though. Even the full power attack of a Formed soul only gave an untiered person a bad headache and left them disoriented for some seconds.
Well, actually, building the Proto-soul is no more exciting than building a wall for his Mind Palace. Fortunately, it’s a rather quick process as long as you have the mana to quickly generate huge amounts of the required elements. And well, mana was really the one thing he rarely lacked.
Not only did time pass as he grew his soul though, but not long after he started, the Auric spirit began a sudden metamorphosis as well. Without even a smidge of advance information, he just woke up to it already hibernating within him once more.
And since that was the case…
Like Jaren and Rebecca, who waited for their evolutions, he just trained day in and day out.
* * *
Three weeks had long since passed since his spirit entered a hibernation once more, turning into a web of aura all over his body which required a constant influx of food to grow. And that, in turn, rapidly drained his mana supply all day long.
With soul training also taking a huge quantity of mana to generate the pure elements he required, it was an annoying situation, but he didn’t complain about it all.
The transformation of his spirit could only go on for so long, and at the very least the spirit itself predicted that it would increase by a full tier in power every time an improvement was made. Though, this information didn’t truly seem to line up with what it inherently knew about its own existence.
The Auric spirit very rarely talked to him these days, although part of that fault lay with him never initiating a conversation.
His theory was that being infused with something draconic greatly increased the thresholds of the spirit’s power, perhaps changing its limit from mithril tier to Cornem. But such a vague suggestion was met with no response from the Nexus. Likely, because the spirit did not draw any power from his bloodline, his question couldn’t be answered.
It was fine in the end though. The next day, in total 22 days after his spirit slept, it finally woke up once more.
And that meant, alongside his half-finished Proto-formed soul, he technically compared to a gold tier in power. And also that he was the last amongst the group to hit this level.
On an unfortunate note, the eight beasts he kept tracking spells on remained unevolved. And while nearly a hundred evolutions took place across the island in the time period, none were on beasts that he fed ice cream to. However, this already small island had thousands upon thousands of beasts, how many had he fed in that time? Maybe a hundred? And since his mutating bloodline was eventually purged, chances are only 50 beasts at any time could grant him a new feature.
Unfortunately, he realised that he should have taken advantage of the Evelard range more… And would have if not for that damn thing in the snow. He was owed those claws!
The occasional hunting of gold and steel tiers gave him another 7 more assimilations, the highest merely a Rare+ which wasn’t worth looking at anymore. It impressed him that the group went from struggling to kill a gold tier to consistently taking them down with minimal injuries. So few in fact that Darak’s shield barely had the chance to grow in power.
Rebecca and Jaren completed their evolutions to Gold rank, the latter’s happening far earlier on as he hit the requirements ages ago, and Rebecca’s only occurring a few days back. These last days gave her more than enough time to adapt to her new level of stealth and speed. While the mana still appeared in Icy’s mana sense, she covered up her own mana so well that it passed as a Bronze rank, and, if combined with a sneak attack, could easily kill him in one move.
As for Jaren, his range for near-perfect accuracy was about 100 metres. High precision remained until about 500 metres, and even at about a kilometre, he could strike a moving object, although not guarantee anything critical without a homing effect attached to the arrow.
He could have gone further if the power he placed on the Mid-rank magical tool didn’t threaten to break it every single time.
But now, everyone felt ready to begin a journey across the ocean. None of them had clothes native to the calm belt, and they knew things in the city might be bad if they looked too wealthy.
This wasn’t a problem for anyone besides Raccelline, as everyone kept some rather generic looking pants and shirts in case they needed to blend into a crowd. But the young girl’s clothes were all naturally overly laden with mana to retain perfect shape all the time and protect her, as well as simply endure her ridiculous natural strength. They could do nothing but place the cloak and have Icy control the mana around her to avoid being found out. Alternatively, they could just hide outside the city, but for now, they needed to know how bad things were.
Naturally, wars wouldn’t touch the calm belt due to its annoying location, but it came with a completely different problem entirely.
These natives despised all from both continents.