I woke up kicking and punching into the unbroken night, my skin wet with sweat and my heart already hammering. I pushed myself to my feet, heart thundering in my chest but froze as memory returned to me – I was on top of a tree of unknown height and it probably was not the best place to be flailing about.
I sat once again, slowly and with great care as my body reminded me of my – fading – injuries. I sat alone in the dark, head in hands, forcing my breathing to even out as I made myself relive the day before, mining it for Experience. Opening myself to the Experience like that, allowing it to flow through me was simultaneously hard and rewarding. On the one hand, it had been terrifying, an ordeal to top even my torture – there was just something so intrinsically wrong with... being eaten. But facing those feelings head-on allowed me to move past them; in embracing them they lost their power over me.
I do not know how long I sat like that, pulling the golden light into my centre and spinning it through my system, refining it into Praxis. However long I sat, my soul sea barely shifted – I knew it was being drained almost as fast as I could fill it by the refinement process, but there was barely any in my centre. I knew that to proceed to the Path stage, I needed to fill my centre with Praxis, forming my core but so far, I had never produced even enough to fill my energy channels, never mind my whole energy centre. It did not help, I was sure, that I kept expelling so much energy.
Perhaps it would take years; though those upon the Path I had met already did not seem too much older than myself – or my new body at least – they had all started as children. Maybe I was destined to be behind the curve, no matter how hard I worked.
With a frown, I shook my head and examined the feeling, casting an objective eye over it, even as I swallowed it whole. I knew relatively little about cultivation – I had been here, on the Aspirant plane for less than two weeks and while it seemed like I had crammed a lot into that time, I had spent perhaps a third of that unconscious. I did not know how fast my development was or even what I should expect at this stage. It seemed my old patterns of thought still held some sway over me, despite my resolution to leave them behind.
If – no, when – I made it back, I would ask Walker about my issues. It was possible this was normal, or simply a matter of practice. It was too early give in.
Nodding, I slapped myself across the face – a warning to myself – and rose to a crouch. Still cultivating Experience and refining it into Praxis, I began to grope my way around the tree. It would normally be too much effort for me to cultivate, refine and explore, but something about lacking sight was focusing my mind. I wondered if this was why Walker wore a blindfold in a world where it seemed virtually any injury could be mended.
The plateau that contained my hollow was huge, for a tree – easily dozens of feet across. The hollow itself sat between two huge branches that reached upwards, as if the trunk had split. I found my bent axe and Walker’s dagger a short distance from where I had awoken, but chose to leave them there for the moment. A number of smaller – but still massive - branches could be felt jutting out from the main body of the tree, easily wide enough to walk on. They should provide a way to travel, provided I could find somewhere to travel to.
Back in my shallow bowl once more, I reached into my rings to grab my healing pills, now that I had some energy to spare. Pushing a filament of Experience into the rings on my toes, I peered inside but could not locate the pills. With a frown, I recalled Ro telling me what the various odds and ends were and then... putting them on the floor. Even the pill I had taken after the fight at the Thrice Frost had been supplied by my generous mentor.
Cursing softly, I mentally berated myself, but quickly recalled that I now had a third ring, taken from the guy I had brained near the armoury. I slipped the ring onto my finger and reached inside – it was what I expected: clothes that probably would not fit, a sword and the same alchemical gubbins I had found in the others. There was also a coin pouch that I left alone, deciding I probably would not need money in the tree.
I pulled the pills out and swallowed it dry, almost gagging on the hard, little ball. A soft warmth worked its way around my body and the pain in my wounds calmed a little.
After a moment of thought, I pulled the clothes from the third ring and tossed them carefully over the side of the tree – I did not need them and they were just taking up space. If I needed random clothes or cloth, I had more sets in the other rings.
Moving over to where I had left the axe and dagger, I picked them up and moved to the right most skyward reaching bough and began to climb. While the branch I was on definitely led upwards, the incline was just gentle enough that I did not always need to make use of my tools, at least at first. As I climbed higher, eager to get above the canopy and hopefully find some civilisation, I continued my cultivation, dragging myself higher as needed. Climbing a mountainous tree that felt as cold as ice, in pitch black and the only sounds coming from myself, was a surreal experience to say the least and I was going to milk it for all it was worse.
After maybe an hour, the branch I was on ended, splitting off into a number of smaller, thinner branches. I was not eager to test my weight against these, at first, but I recalled the unnatural strength of the wood, as well as the fact that despite their relative frailty – relative to the rest of the tree, these smaller twigs were still more than a foot across.
I tried and failed to not picture the vast void beneath me as I moved along and among the branches, sometimes on all fours and sometimes using my axe or dagger, or both for grip.
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Several hours after I had woken up, I pulled myself up into a very thin Y-shape split, this one only a couple of inches wide and extended up, my head pressing through leaves. I was blinded as my head poked above the canopy of the hellish forest, the light stabbing into my eyes like shards of glass. I closed my eyes and shielded my eyes with one hand, the other holding me steady on the branch before I opened them into a squint, my face pulled into a grimace of pain.
After a few minutes, I could see clearly, though there was still a little discomfort. The sky was a deep blue, dotted with yellow and peach coloured clouds. I spotted islands floating higher up, scattered across the sky like islands in the infinite blue.
I looked down at the treetops, stretching away from me in every direction and for as far as I could see, the unbroken black seeming almost flat with no details below the skyline.
This was a world far stranger than the one I had left, which seemed much like Earth but... more.
I heard a distant voice and I tenses – if the Devourers had come after me, I was pretty fucked, trapped as I was at the top of a tree.
The voice called again, and I turned, shielding my eyes once more. Behind me, twin suns hung in the endless azure, and between them – though closer – a wooden ship rode the wind, just above the featureless black of the forest. The ship was painted white and was accented in mirror-bright metal, with vast wings jutting out from its sides, the undersides of which were covered in crystals that shone bright enough to challenge the distant stars. A head was poking over the side, along with an arm pointed in my direction.
As the ship drew above me, a rope was cast over the side, dangling just within my reach. Thinking that whatever was up there had to be better than what was below, I stored my axe and the dagger back inside a ring and grabbed onto the rope.
I could feel myself being pulled upwards, but I was impatient to be out of that frigid place and my wounds had mostly healed by then, so hand-over-hand I pulled myself up the rope as fast as I could. In my previous life, I do not think I had ever managed to climb a rope like this, at all, let alone with such speed. Within moments – thanks to my new body and my renewed Praxis - I was being pulled over the side of the ship.
A crowd had gathered around me, by then, and for the barest of moments I thought I had delivered myself back into the Devourer’s clutches, but I quickly realised that this was the other race of elf-like people I had seen, though I could not recall the name of their race.
“Stranger, how came you to rise from the Black?” The speaker looked important – by which I mean her pristine white uniform had for more shiny bits than anybody else’s. She was also speaking another language, one that I knew without recognising. Again.
“I, ugh, started at the bottom and worked my way up?”
“You come from amongst the Phage? Impossible.”
“You mean the Devourers? No. Definitely not with them. It's hard to explain... it's a long story.”
“You should try.” Her tone was flat and I noticed her hand rested on the pommel of a rapier looking sword hung on her hip.
“So, I’m sort of from another world. I was trying to find the cure to a – sort of – magic plague? The man that had it fled here, well, down there anyway. I followed him.”
“This story was not particularly long or hard to explain, it would seem."
“I guess not? It’s a figure of speech where I’m from.”
“You are a World Walker, a Paragon? It is little wonder you could survive the Phage.”
“I have no idea what a Paragon is, but you’re not the first to call me a World Walker. The second actually. So, it seems like I might be, yes.”
“You speak our language strangely, but I think I understand. You will come with us; Lucas will better know how to proceed.”
“As long as that doesn’t involve throwing me overboard, I’m all about it.”
“Come than, ‘Walker. You are in the way.”
“Actually, Walker is my mentor...”
She stared at me, huge irises a shocking reflective gold, and I shut up and followed after her to the back of the ship, the whispered muttering of the crew following me, just below hearing.
*
***
*
As it turned out, this Lucas I was being taken to see was quite some distance away. I had spoken to some of the crew – when they were not on duty – and it seemed I was aboard some sort of patrol. Apparently, the forest was not just the home of the Devourers, but of quite a number of other giant beasts. The other variel – the elves – I had spoken to had been quite shocked that I had not encountered any of them, and I was really, really glad that I had not, once they started describing them – huge half-plant insects the size of the ship we stood on, and flying spiders twice that size. I noped right out of that conversation, making weak excuses as I went looking for Inca, the woman I had spoken to earlier. She was apparently the Quartermaster, rather than the captain, though apparently that was more important, sometimes? I had never been an authority on maritime anything, let-alone weird alien flying naval customs. I thought it prudent to leave deciding who was important or not to them.
I found Inca below deck making notes on a huge map by the light of another crystal, though this one was nowhere near as bright as those under the wing.
“Hellooo.”
“What do you wish, Hunter? I am busy.”
“I’m just sort of bored, nobody seems to want to spar and I don’t have a job to do. I like meditating as much as the next guy, but I need to do things.”
“Your state of mind is not my business, unless you grow dangerous. Please go away, it will be days before we reach Lucas’ island. You will need to cope.”
Honestly, that sounded fair. They had saved me from that damned forest by picking me up and were going out of their way to take me to this Lucas person, who would apparently know what to do with me. It was not fair of me to be bugging them.
“Sure. Sorry to bother you.” Inca did not say anything further, and had never looked up from the map and her notes so I awkwardly turned and left.
I went back up on deck, the bright light of the suns still bright enough to make me wince. For a few minutes, I stood by one of the wings, staring down at the ocean of canopy below. While I had been down there, the dark carpet of leaves had seemed flat, like true black, but where the light of the wings swept, a bright, brilliant rainbow shone reflected back up at us, like catching the sun in oil. It was quite a sight, and pushing my legs through the rail, I sat down, eyes locked on that rainbow in the dark, and went back to cultivation and refining, thinking that maybe a few days without a deadly threat was just what I needed to make some real headway in forming my Core.