From the top of the cliff, Elijah studied the encampment across the strait separating his island from what he expected was the mainland, and what he found was inexplicably infuriating. With Eyes of the Eagle, he could clearly see the beginnings of a primitive town nestled at the foot of a mountain. The low-slung buildings had been constructed of seamless concrete – or some magical variant, he expected – from which grew thick smokestacks that were steadily belching black clouds into the otherwise pristine air.

The town was surrounded by thick forests not unlike what Elijah had found on his island, but the inhabitants had waged a war against the flora, clearing large swathes of trees in the process. No doubt, they had been used as fuel for their fires. Or perhaps they’d been used to construct the sturdy-looking barges moored at the town’s simplistic dock. Either way, the sight filled Elijah with a degree of sorrow he couldn’t adequately describe.

He'd never really been an environmentalist – not like many of his colleagues. Certainly, he’d always tried to conserve where he could, and he had never been an unrepentant polluter, but he also knew that environmental issues were far more complicated than the hardcore activists wanted to admit. In a vacuum, it was easy to tell people to drive electric cars or eschew eating meat, but those were solutions only available to a select few. Others had to do what they had to do, regardless of environmental consequences.

That wasn’t to say that Elijah didn’t want to hold industry accountable for their profit-driven choices. He did. He just understood that things were far less simple than they might appear to be at first glance.

However, when he looked upon that decimated forest and the billowing black smoke, he felt a degree of anger he’d never felt before. Clearly, that was his Nature aspect – and the connection that came with his archetype – screaming at him. He did his best to push it to the back of his mind, but it was difficult.

The fact that the inhabitants of that town didn’t appear to be human helped, though. Elijah didn’t know what any of them were called, but he saw creatures that reminded him of stereotypical fantasy dwarves, gnomes, and goblins, all of which were working together.

Soon, Elijah noticed a flood of the small-statured creatures pour out of what he thought was a mountain cave. Upon further inspection, though, he saw that each of those people – if indeed, that was the right word – was carrying a mining pick. After that, it didn’t take much longer for Elijah to notice the carts full of unrefined ore, though he was too far away to utilize his limited geological knowledge to identify what it was.

Elijah stood there, watching the town from miles away, until he could confidently say that the entire settlement was a mining operation. Likely, the chimneys belching clouds of billowing black smoke were connected to smelters, from which they would extract metal from the raw ore.

More than that, though, Elijah saw that the refined metals were taken to the biggest building, which looked more elaborate than all the rest. For some reason, he didn’t think he was looking at a warehouse. The building was too elaborate and far too small to serve that purpose. And given that his own spell, Ancestral Circle, had a teleportation component, it didn’t take him long to guess that the alliance of dwarves, gnomes, and goblins had access to something similar.

Or perhaps he was wrong. He was still far too new to the transformed world to understand what was and wasn’t possible. However, he felt unreasonably confident in his assertions.

For a while, Elijah wondered what he should do. The distance from the island to the town wasn’t short; at least ten miles, but probably more than that, separated him from the coast. So, it would not be an easy trip, even if he managed to construct a raft of some sort. He never even considered swimming; seeing the transformation of the trout, with all their extra teeth, was enough to dissuade him from that notion. And that wasn’t even considering that the monster that had almost killed him had come from the sea. Who knew what else was down there?

After a while, Elijah realized that, while the discovery was interesting, it didn’t really affect his situation. With the inability to cross the strait, the best he could do was create a bonfire and hope they saw it. Then, he’d have to hope that they were friendly, which wasn’t entirely likely, given that the town’s inhabitants weren’t even human. No – nothing had changed, save for the fact that he needed to be on his guard.

Which was the same as always.

As the sun began to dip toward the horizon, Elijah reluctantly turned away and started back toward his cabin. Fortunately, he’d long since mastered traversal through the thick foliage, so he made good time back to the Grove. There, he did a circuit around the clearing, keeping Nature’s Bounty active, before he retreated to his cabin where prepared some stew, which was comprised of seaweed, crab meat, and mushrooms.

So, the same thing he ate most days.

As he sat there spooning the stew into his mouth, Elijah was struck by a deep sense of longing. It wasn’t the first time he’d missed his old life and, more importantly, people, but after seeing civilization so close, the feeling came back with a vengeance. With their setup, the dwarves, gnomes, and goblins were probably eating like kings. Even if they didn’t have access to teleportation – which, for some reason he couldn’t explain, he doubted – their area was probably home to plenty of game. Deer, wild hogs, and a multitude of other edible animals were native to the region, and the thought of enjoying a nice venison steak filled Elijah with a deep sense of longing.

Of course, he also missed his friends. He wished he could talk to his sister. Or her family. Idly, Elijah wondered how everyone else in the world was doing. Were they struggling to survive, just like him? Or were things easier in the cities? Were there even cities left? The world had supposedly been rearranged, so there was no guarantee that there hadn’t been more changes.

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He sighed.

For now, mere survival was difficult enough. But what about the future? Would he be content to remain an island hermit for months? Perhaps years? No. He needed more than that. He needed a purpose. The problem was that Elijah had never been burdened with anything of the sort. After his parents had died, he’d thrown himself into his schoolwork, eventually getting his doctorate despite not really being passionate about marine biology. Sure, it was interesting enough, and he did enjoy it, but only as a job. It was never a purpose.

But now, magic was real. The impossible was now possible. Not that long ago, he’d spoken to a tree. With a mere thought, he could call lightning from the sky. Not to mention his healing abilities. He had power. The question was how he wanted to use it.

The problem was that he didn’t know the answer to that fundamental question, and he wasn’t sure if he would figure it out anytime soon.

Not that it was urgent. Staying alive in such an unforgiving world was hard enough to occupy most of his focus. So, for the time being, he just had to keep going, and that wouldn’t change until at least the spring. With that thought, Elijah let sleep overtake him.

When he awoke the next morning, he embarked on his daily routine of exercise and target practice. At first, his physical attributes had improved, but they’d stalled out at nine points, which just seemed to confirm his suspicions that if he wanted to go past ten, he would need to allocate his points appropriately. Still, with his ability to heal, he felt better than he had since college. He was only thirty years old, but they’d been a hard thirty years filled with sports injuries. But with constant usage of Touch of Nature, the remnants of those injuries, which had presented themselves via nagging aches and pains, had faded to nothing, leaving him whole and hale.

If he’d had proper nutrition, Elijah would have been in the best shape of his life.

After his target practice, Elijah headed to his nascent Grove, where he completed his daily circuit powered by Nature’s Bounty. The saplings seemed to have grown a few inches, and his garden of berry bushes had continued to sprout. Soon enough, he hoped to have a proper Grove. Once it crossed whatever arbitrary threshold that was imposed by his spell – or maybe the System itself – he would be able to test out the teleportation feature.

Once he’d finished his circuit, Elijah settled down next to the majestic tree at the center of the clearing, where he recast Nature’s Bounty, pushing extra Ethera into it. The pathways of his soul flexed, expanding minutely with every pulse of energy only to return back to normal a moment later. However, they did seem a bit thicker than they had the day before. It might have been his imagination – or wishful thinking, perhaps – but his soul seemed a little sturdier. The pathways a little wider. It was as if the previous day’s exertions had stretched them enough that some of the benefits remained.

In some ways, it wasn’t unlike his daily exercise. Repeated exertion seemed to be the key to channeling more Ethera through his soul, which he hoped would allow him to cast more powerful spells.

Or maybe he was doing things completely wrong and he was on the verge of ruining his pathways. He had no way of knowing. But what he was doing felt right, which was enough to keep him going.

Over the next six weeks, Elijah continued the rhythm of his existence. Even as the weather grew colder and more inhospitable, his days maintained the familiar cadence of improvement and the necessities of survival. From time to time, he’d go back to the cliff, where he continued to observe his neighbors. The town grew, with many of the buildings gaining an extra story or two. And whether it was imagination or not, the population seemed to increase as well. So, too, did their impact on the environment.

Elijah seethed as he watched the forest’s retreat, but he had no idea what to do about it. Nor was he sure if he truly cared if they cleared a little bit of the woodland. There were plenty of trees out there, after all. But he felt what he felt, artificial or not, and he couldn’t escape it.

Toward the end of the sixth week, though, Elijah had a breakthrough that cut right through the monotony.

It happened as he sat next to the tree at the center of his Grove; the saplings had continued to grow, and they were on the verge of becoming proper trees. He could feel his spell teetering on the edge of activation. But that wasn’t the source of his breakthrough. Instead, that distinction belonged to what he’d begun to refer to as his soul cultivation.

The pathways of Elijah’s soul had continued to thicken; the effect was only minute, but even a small change was cause for celebration because it allowed him to channel more Ethera into Nature’s Bounty, which in turn caused the spell’s radius to increase. In the beginning, it had only been about ten feet wide, but now, the circle’s diameter was at least fifteen feet.

Following the same pattern he always did, Elijah flexed the Ethera, pushing against the boundaries of his pathways. They stretched, but he felt that they could take more, so he continued to shove more Ethera through them. Then, suddenly, something snapped.

Elijah gasped as the Ethera ran wild, tearing down the limits imposed by his pathways. In the space of a second, his entire soul began to degrade under the influence of the tidal wave of Ethera. Panicking, he tried to stem the flow, but his cultivation System had no interest in following his commands. Instead, Ethera flooded through his mind, dragged into his soul from his surroundings. Meanwhile, the energy in his core came in from the other side, and when the two energies met, they did so with explosive force.

The world felt like it was ripping him in two. Elijah screamed, but it was useless. He could hardly think amidst the pain, much less find a solution to the problem. Over and over, those two opposing forces crashed against one another, sending agony arcing through Elijah’s body, soul, and mind.

It went on for a subjective eternity as the Ethera tormented him. Before, Elijah had considered the energy benign, but free from the confines of his cultivation System, it was an incredibly destructive force. Especially when the two different flavors – the wild Ethera and the energy from his core – clashed.

But Elijah endured. He couldn’t have said how. He didn’t know why. He just clung to his life with as much fervor as could muster as he maintained the grip on his sanity. And slowly, the clashing energies transformed his pathways.

But they didn’t grow wider. In fact, they were destroyed completely, and the loose Ethera was freed to rampage through his body. But as the seconds turned to minutes, and minutes turned to hours, the transformation took hold, and suddenly, he crested the peak, and his body – or his soul – started to absorb the Ethera. At first, it only took a trickle, but soon, that trickle became a torrent.

Then, at last, Elijah’s soul drank the last of the Ethera that had been raging through his body, and he collapsed. When he did, a new notification appeared in his mind’s eye:

Congratulations! You have cultivated a Neophyte Soul!

He only had a moment to study that notification and smile before unconsciousness overtook him.