Waves of dense Ethera crashed against Elijah’s mind, threatening to envelop and overwhelm him, and yet, he endured, bracing himself for each impact. It was the only thing that kept him from being completely engulfed by the magical energy. Just before the latest wave slammed into him, he opened the aperture of his mind as wide as he could. The results were predictable, and yet, still surprising. The flow of dense Ethera threatened to rip him apart as it rushed through his mind and into his soul. There, most of it dissipated, evaporating into nothing before a trickle entered his core.
He held the aperture open for only a second, but in that time, he very nearly tore his mind to pieces. When he closed his mind, he collapsed into panting exhaustion as his hands slammed into the mud-covered floor of the appliance store. For a few seconds, he knelt there, his mind and body twisting into knots. Gradually, though, he mastered himself, and after a couple of minutes, he managed to force his eyes open.
Elijah flinched back when he saw a wet snout and a pair of glistening brown eyes only a handful of inches from his face. The bear wasn’t having it. Instead, it advanced, then snorted, sending a mist of mucus and other wet gooeyness to coat his face.
“Oh, come on, man…”
It snorted again, then sat on its backside like a trained circus bear.
“Seriously? Again? I just fed you,” Elijah complained. That got a low growl in response. “Don’t give me that. You’re perfectly capable of hunting your own food. I can’t spend all my time fishing. I’m on the clock here.”
Indeed, he’d been trying to cultivate his mind and reach the next stage for the past three days, and he knew that if he didn’t make a breakthrough soon, he’d need to move on without reaching his goal. The tower was still a threat, and if he didn’t challenge it soon, another surge would come. And then, more people would die.
His cultivation wasn’t worth that.
Elijah told himself that he would’ve already gotten to the next stage if it wasn’t for the bear’s greed. His plan of offering it a meal had backfired, and now, it expected him to run off and catch some fish each time its stomach rumbled. And given its size, that was quite a frequent occurrence. So far, he’d acquiesced to the animal’s demands, mostly because it was a bear the size of a Honda Civic. But he was nearing the end of his rope.
Still, once he managed to get his body and mind under control, Elijah pushed himself to his feet, gathered his staff and pack, then shifted into his scaled panther form. He didn’t do so for its stealth or combat capabilities; rather, he knew that, of his three forms – human, scaled panther, and guardian – the predator form was by far the fastest.
That was because it increased both his Strength and Dexterity attributes by a significant amount. So, that form, coupled with his personal enhancements and Essence of the Wolf, gave him the ability to traverse the terrain with incredible alacrity.
So, he reached the stream in only a few minutes. When he did, he quickly started swatting the fish out of the water. Fishing in his scaled panther form required a different strategy than doing so as a guardian, but it was at least as efficient.
Soon enough, Elijah had caught almost thirty fish.
Once he’d gotten enough, he switched back to his human form, threw the fish into his pack – he didn’t like it, but that was the best and most efficient way to get a lot of fish to the bear – then, shifted back into his predator form for the trip back.
Predictably, he found the bear right where he’d left him.
“This is it,” he said, resuming his human form and tossing the fish at the ursine. “No more until I finish.”
The bear snorted, then started to noisily devour the offered pile of fish. Not for the first time, Elijah considered shifting back into one of his animal forms and attacking the greedy, slothful beast. But he suspected that that wouldn’t end well for either of them. So, he restrained himself, then crossed the abandoned appliance store and set himself atop a mostly destroyed dishwasher.
That was as close as he could get to the amanita without actually touching it – which would be a mistake, as he’d found out on his first day in the appliance store. Even a tiny brush against the thing’s cap had made Elijah so ill that it had taken so many casts of Touch of Nature to heal him that his core had gone dry.
And in the interim, he’d been miserable, spewing from both ends. It had taken every ounce of his self-control to keep himself casting. No – he had no interest in repeating that, so he got as close as he dared, then settled back down to meditate.
As it had every time in the vicinity of the enormous mushroom, the moment he opened the aperture of his mind, the Ethera came pouring in. Elijah’s first instinct was to flinch away from the torrent – he had the first few times – but he shoved that instinct aside and forced the aperture of his mind to remain open.
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The Ethera flooded his soul, then, slowly, began to seep through his pores before dissipating back into the air. Over and over, Elijah flexed the aperture, forcing it wider and wider until it became physically painful. Still, he kept going, and soon enough, he started to pull against the current. He needed more Ethera. So, with one half of his mind, he grabbed ahold of the torrent of Ethera, pulling it with all his might. And with the other half, he forced the aperture wider.
The Ethera filled him, body, mind, and soul.
And yet, he still didn’t progress. He felt confident that the effect of his cultivation on his Regeneration had been increased, but it wasn’t enough to push him over the edge to the next stage.
Something was missing.
With most of his conscious thought occupied with the Mind exercises, Elijah had trouble focusing on the problem at hand. However, soon enough, an errant thought skittered across his mind. To achieve the Opal Mind, he’d had to channel Ethera into the partition he’d created so he could deal with the effects of his locus. So, what if that was what was missing? What if he needed to bolster that partition?
Desperate to make progress, Elijah did just that, breaking the flow of Ethera into two. One went into his soul, then misted into the air. But the other went into the partition he’d created.
Most of the time, Elijah didn’t even think about it. It was just there, and it kept him from being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that came with his Domain. However, as he focused on it, he couldn’t deny that it was a beautiful, almost tangible thing. Elijah wasn’t certain if he was simply imagining it, or if it truly was the webwork of Ethera that it seemed to be, but he latched onto the idea that it was the latter.
And he used the onslaught of Ethera to enhance it.
Soon enough, one strand of Ethera became two. And two became three. The web slowly transitioned into a three-dimensional thing that encompassed his entire Mind. Before, it had simply separated it into two halves, but by the time Elijah was finished, it had become something far more complex.
Still, it wasn’t until he received a notification that he recognized it for what it was:
Congratulations! You have cultivated a Quartz Mind!
Quartz.
The ethereal structure in his mind looked like a faceted gem. A rough one, barely more than a natural stone, but it was unmistakable. On top of that, instead of two separate pieces, it had been divided into nine. And in the center of each one was a miniature aperture. None were as large or as wide as their predecessor, but collectively, they could handle far more Ethera.
Elijah couldn’t be certain, but after a little testing, he guessed that the effect of his Regeneration on his ability to regain Ethera had been improved by at least twenty-five percent. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as it had been when he’d first cultivated the Opal Mind, but it was a sizable increase, nonetheless.
He was tempted to stay and see if he could work on the rest of his cultivation, but there were two problems with that. The first was that he didn’t really have any hints as to how he might go about it. He’d tried to simply repeat the actions that had put him on the path of cultivation in the first place, but he’d had very limited success. So, he would have to spend precious time figuring it out before he could even make any progress. It had taken months of practice – every chance he’d gotten, he had cultivated his Mind – to prepare for the final push into Quartz. And he suspected it would be a similar path with the other facets of cultivation.
However, more pressing was the simple fact that he needed to enter the tower sooner rather than later or the people of Norcastle would suffer the consequences of his inaction. He couldn’t stomach having that on his conscience, so, after he’d gotten a handle on the new structure of his Quartz Mind, Elijah pushed himself to his feet.
“Well, that’s it,” he said to the bear, who hadn’t bothered to move. It had only opened a single eye. “I guess…well, goodbye. No more free fish for you.”
If the animal cared at all, it gave no indication. So, with a sigh and a shake of his head, Elijah slipped off the old dishwasher, gathered his things, then reapplied his various enhancements. Once Essence of the Monkey, Aura of Renewal, and Essence of the Boar had been activated, he embraced Essence of the Wolf, then slipped into the Shape of the Predator, and left the little town behind.
Over the next day and a half, Elijah traversed the wilderness. As always, he killed any Voxx he found – which was only two, but he exterminated both of them with extreme prejudice. And slowly, he homed in on the location of the tower. As it turned out, the map was a little off, but with Elijah’s incredible traversal speed, he had little trouble finding the structure.
Unlike the first tower Elijah had challenged, which presented as a giant, headless statue just offshore of his island, the latest tower took the shape of a featureless green obelisk. Its sides were entirely smooth, to the point where Elijah couldn’t even see the seams of whatever stone that had been used in its construction. At its base were four smaller pillars, each about twenty feet tall and ending in a tapered point.
The tower itself was at least twenty times that height, and it reminded Elijah of nothing so much as the Washington Monument back in the District of Columbia. He’d only been to Washington, D.C. once, and that was back when he was in high school, but he distinctly remembered how awe-inspiring the giant monument to America’s first president was. The green obelisk definitely had that same aura about it, and Elijah couldn’t help but feel a bit intimidated by the simple majesty on display.
And that feeling was further enhanced by the thick Ethera hanging in the air. It was nothing compared to the island, but it was much denser than anywhere else in the region, save for the immediate area around the amanita. Even if he hadn’t known what the obelisk represented, the density of the ambient Ethera would have screamed its importance.
For the next hour, Elijah slowly circled the structure. He quickly found the door – a simple, square opening that led into impenetrable darkness – but he ignored it at first. Instead, he wanted to get the lay of the land so that when he managed to conquer the tower, he would know what he was exiting into.
As it turned out, there wasn’t anything notable about the area. A few scattered trees decorated the meadow in which it was located, but Elijah couldn’t find any wildlife. Likely, they’d all been scared away by the surges.
So, after he’d satisfied his curiosity, Elijah took a deep breath, checked his supplies for what felt like the hundredth time, then strode forward and into the tower.