It was dusk in the Xing’an Larch forest, and near the middle of it lay a young sleeping essence user, all alone. He was tanned and fit from the summer’s sports. He was average in bulk with a touch of baby fat and was the tallest in his family at 5’10”. It might have been because he was a mouth breather or just incidental when a pine cone fell from a hundred feet and landed on his front tooth.
Jean awoke spasming and turned over to the side to spit out a tooth. He looked around the forest but saw nothing and heard nothing besides the echo of his own yelp.
He had to tilt his head forward to let the blood pour out of his mouth. He had a firm grasp on the feeling of his bones, so he was keenly aware of the lack of a tooth and the two teeth that were chipped.
The bone growth skill activated to regrow his teeth as Jean focused. He initiated his meditative essence ability Quiet Place to increase his health and mana regeneration. It only took a minute to fully recover from the ordeal.
Shaking his head, Jean once again looked up and around.
“Gabe?” Jean called out, “Valderianous?”
Where did they go? I must have been asleep for at least six hours. The sun is already going down. Ahh…
Jean looked down as a piece of paper fell off his chest. Picking it up, it read, “Good luck on your squirrel hunt. We believe in you. - Gabe and Spank”
Jean took the note and put it in his pocket. And looked again off into the distance, “I hope I can actually find you. Little buddy.”
Jean took out an iron spirit coin from his Soul Inventory and popped it into his mouth.
“Off we go.”
And so Jean began to walk. He stopped after a step and grabbed his tooth from the ground, and then continued.
As he meandered into the dark, he thought about how he nearly died earlier in the day, and surprisingly, it wasn’t bothering him as much as he thought it would. Instead, he just felt the presence of the Screech Echo in his aura and started to talk to him about it.
The connection with the summoned familiar was instant. It seemed like it cared and was able to sympathize with Jean’s struggles and trama. It couldn’t really communicate with words yet, but Jean could feel his emotions while it was in his aura. His buddy was a good listener, more than just a captive audience.
While he was talking to his listening buddy, he rolled his tooth around in his fingers. Curiously enough, he thought that he could still use his Bone Growth ability on his dislodged tooth. So, Jean passively squished it and hardened it. The combo of talking, walking, and fidgeting was quite cathartic.
After a bit, Jean tested out his Bone Growth ability more by reshaping the tooth and adding more mass to it. Soon enough he had a foot-long smooth ivory pole. Using that much mana caused him to exhaust his mana pool, but he felt like it was a good use of time. He was crafting his own tooth into something creative and functional.
Out of curiosity, Jean tested his limits more. He stopped walking, sat down to start his Quite Place, and tested. He was able to section off the top of the bone into a small ball and broke it off from the rest of the bone.
Grinning, Jean did the same thing again and reshaped the pole into twelve small orbs of bone. He put eleven of them into his inventory and looked at one. He started the process over and grew the bone into a six-inch knife. It wasn’t much of a knife, but the top inch or so of the blade was almost-sharp, and the tip was sharp.
Jean was satisfied with his testing for the moment and dropped his dagger into his inventory. He got up and started his march once again.
It was getting late, and it was getting hard to see the trees around him. There wasn’t any moonlight in the sky, so Jean quickly stopped again.
I’m not going to get very far at this rate. But crafting, who knew it would be so satifying.
Jean, sat and meditated again, and made himself a permanent cloud bed. He had to stop to let his Mana refill twice, so it took about half an hour. It was more than worth it.
He laid down on the bed and looked up past the trees to the full sky of stars in complete comfort. He could only see through a crack above him where the trees didn’t dominate the sky, but in that sliver of sky, he could see more stars than he ever could in San Bernardino.
While Jean was watching the sky he saw a flash in the corner of his vision so small he thought that he might have imagined it. He turned his head a watched for the light again.
There we go, I’ve found you.
There was another small flare-up in the trees fifty yards away. It was hardly noticeable, but Jean was watching for it specifically.
Jean experimented and luckily he was able to put his bed into his inventory even though it was bigger than a twin bed. Then, Jean ran.
As he was moving toward the flare, he saw another one even further away. He picked up his pace to catch up to the moving flashes.
Jean was gaining on the flares, keeping his aura retracted. He planned to get close enough to it that he could suppress it with his aura for a moment and then grab it. Jean wasn’t sure what he would do if it stayed aloft. But he pursued it regardless. He got close enough to be sure that it was an ash squirrel running, flaring into ashes, and then reforming a distance away.
Twenty minutes passed with Jean running through the dark forest, trailing the ash squirrel. It looked like it was going in a consistent direction, and the few times that Jean tried to use his aura to make the squirrel freeze, it didn’t. It didn’t even seem like it was aiming to get away, rather, it was leading Jean somewhere.
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Another twenty minutes of Jean running at full speed had passed and Jean used a stamina potion to keep the pace. Now, Jean was sure that the ash squirrel was leading him somewhere, and so he stopped thinking of a way to capture the little dude, and just followed with his senses expecting to find a Billy stuck in the bottom of a well.
Soon enough Jean slowed down upon seeing a mangled body lying on the dark forest floor. He looked like a priest of purity according to the robes he wore. He had a hole clear through his chest where his heart should have been. Jean stood at a distence from the body, staring at it.
A larger flash in front of him up in a tree tore his eyes away. The squirrel kept going in the same direction. Jean looked down at the body, and walked around it, not wanting to get too close, and kept following the Ash Squirrel.
A few minutes later and the squirrel dropped down from the tree and landed by a thick tree trunk. Jean went to it. As he got closer he saw the foot of someone leaning against the tree he was approaching.
Carefully, Jean circled around to find a bulky girl knocked out, with a hole in her chest like the other dead man. She was wearing similar white battle robes, with a few armor pieces attached. He felt an aura coming off the girl.
I think she’s alive.
Unsure, Jean went up to the girl, kneeling beside her. He saw the wound: Ribs shattered, skin and flesh gone. It looked fake to Jean. He had never inspected real gore before, but he was sure that he should be seeing veins, arteries, and a lung through where there was a hole. It didn’t look like the priest’s innards who died from the same injury.
Kicking himself for pausing, Jean pulled out a healing potion from his inventory and poured it into the girl’s mouth. She had a familiar face. But his attention was drawn to the gaping hole in her chest an inch under her collar bone just left to the center.
After the potion was in the girl, Jean started his Quiet Place ability next to the body.
The girl. She’s not a body yet. She can make it. She isn’t going to die. She’s going to make it. Jean lied to himself.
A bit of blood seeped out of the flesh, at the girl twitched.
“You are alive!” Jean shouted in surprise.
Jean looked at the wound and thought about what he could do.
He took out the refilling cup from his inventory, poured water through the girl’s chest hole, and tried to wash the wound with the water and his cleansing aura.
He saw the bits of shattered ribs, and thought, I can do something about the bone.
He washed his hands and put his hand into the wound to pick out the shard pieces, then he dropped the cup back in his inventory. Moments later the wound was more discernible. Jean could tell where the two ribs got broken through both sides of the body and the shoulder blade was shattered.
He took out three of his bone orbs from his inventory, and placed the first one at the back of the chest, to replace the shoulder blade. He used his bone growth ability to shape the bone perfectly where there was missing bone and filled the cracks in the withstanding shoulder blade. He smoothed the bone and merged the marrow.
Jean felt the bone merge, and strangely, he started to feel the girl’s whole skeleton as if it was his own. He felt his spine tingle, as the grotesque nature of what he was doing set in. He shut out the reality of the situation and delved into the feeling of his second skeleton.
He started to repair all the bone damage in her body, reconnecting the ribs with regrown bone and repairing the bones that he couldn’t previously see that were also broken along her back and shoulder.
Jean had to drink a mana potion to keep going, but he had to keep going.
The skeletal structure of the girl was repaired.
Is that all I can do? Jean thought.
The flesh seemed to have started to heal, but Jean couldn’t leave the bone cage empty of flesh while it healed.
Jean said, “I hope this doesn’t hurt anything.” While he conjured a semi-permanent cloud to hold the wound together, filling the gap of flesh in and around the ribcage. His hope was that the pressure would stop the bleeding and keep debris out of the wound.
Jean sat back, having done everything that he could do besides trying to keep his Quite Place going. Jean prayed and put his head on the girl’s thigh. His aura sense told him that the girl was alive, but Jean was sure she wasn’t breathing. In fact, he was sure she didn’t have lungs.
Several minutes passed, letting Jean catch his breath and take in his surroundings. Once he was aware, he realized that his pant leg was being pulled. He looked over and back at his leg. The Ash Squirrel was pulling on his pant leg with his pant in the squirrel’s teeth.
Jean conjured the Bone Collar and put it around the squirrel while it kept trying to pull him.
The moment the collar was around the rodent’s torso, it shrank to a tight fit on the squirrel’s body under its arms.
Instantly, Jean felt the squirrel’s barely else than sentient thoughts. The panic he had just recovered from returned.
“There’s someone else to rescue?” Jean asked. He stood up, but then reconsidered. His Quiet Place, which he realized just deactivated with his fresh panic, might have been the only thing keeping the girl alive.
He took a long look at the girl and said, “I’ll be right back.”
Jean stood and the squirrel ran to guide him. He followed his new familiar and his current guide.
The next person was closer than Jean thought might be the case. A hundred fifty yards away, Jean sensed an aura ability. Running and turning around a tree, he saw a teenage boy leaning against a glowing green crystal, hidden in the deep roots of the tree.
There was blood coating the crystal under the guy. But he was breathing.
Jean ran, sliding under the roots to get to him. The sudden sound scared the guy, and he jerked, looking up. He drew a bow that Jean didn’t initially see, and pointed it up at Jean.
“Wait!” Jean yelled, “I just came to help.”
The stranger stared at Jean for a few moments before lowering his bow. He slumped as if he was passing out. Jean got closer to him.
You are being healed by a friendly Healing Crystal Totem.
That must be how he survived.
Jean got up next to him and pulled out a healing potion.
“Can I give you a potion?” Jean asked the dazed teen. But he just looked up for a second with confusion and then passed out.
Jean took that as consent and tilted his head back and poured a healing potion down his throat. Jean looked at his face and it looked familiar, too. Sadly, the hole in his chest was familiar as well.
Jean wiped the blood off the wound and robe and saw that the hole was already closed, though there was a brutal scar in its place.
He’ll be ok too.
He looked back at his familiar who was sitting on the ground outside of the tree roots.
“Good job, buddy, I’m going to call you Rescue Ranger. Maybe just Ranger for short. Can you watch him while I go get the girl?” He asked Ranger.
Ranger stared up at him giving a sense of approval, and then ran over and jumped on the guy’s lap.
Jean scratched Ranger’s head, “Good girl.”
Jean ran back to the girl who was still knocked out. He thought about lifting her and carrying her over, but he didn’t think he could do it. Instead, he summoned his cloud bed from his inventory and pulled her onto it. From there he was able to push the bed without any drag.
He brought her over to the other guy’s root covering. He couldn’t fit the bed through the roots as it was, so he sculpted the bed thinner, just wide enough for the girl not to fall off, and then he pulled her in under the roots.
It took some bending around, but he formed a bit more cloud underneath himself and the other dude so that they could all lay down on the soft cloud, intertangled with the tree roots.
Jean sat in between the two and continued his Quiet Place in conjunction with the healing totem in range.
Everyone is going to be ok
Quest Update: You have assisted the outworlders in their quests.
Rewards: Iron rank healing unguent x4. Awakening stone of Tentacle.