“What the hell?” Elijah demanded, glaring at the Witch Hunter.

“What?” asked Dat, an expression of wide-eyed innocence on his face as he stood over the Ka’alaki Druid’s body. “He’s not dead.”

Elijah looked closer, concentrating on One with Nature. It had gone wild during the previous encounter, obscuring his senses to a large degree. But now everything was back to normal, which let him confirm Dat’s claim. The Druid was still alive, though his body was entirely devoid of ethera. There was still some in his Core, but the pathways of the Soul were blocked, sealing it away.

“What did you do?” Elijah demanded.

“I’m a Witch Hunter, bro. Killing and disabling powerful magic users is my thing,” Dat answered. “Uh…in the opposite order, though.”

Until that point, Elijah had begun to look at Dat as something like moral support. Sure, the man was strong enough to contribute in battle, and he made for a passable scout. However, he didn’t really excel at anything. Now, Elijah could see what made the Witch Hunter special.

The Druid was powerful. Not only was he a higher level than Elijah, but his cultivation was far superior. Just one look at the Ka’alaki’s soul was enough to confirm that he’d progressed much further down his path than Elijah had traversed his own. The network of pathways were dizzyingly complex, weaving together in a maze that Elijah could scarcely comprehend, much less copy.

But it represented an opportunity he didn’t think he’d ever get again. And even if he was afforded a similar chance, it wouldn’t be for a long, long time. So, he asked, “How long can you hold him?”

“They have genders now?” asked Sadie.

Elijah shrugged. “I think so. I was just following Dat’s lead.”

Indeed, Dat had referred to the Druid via male pronouns, and given that the Witch Hunter had access to more information than anyone else, Elijah had assumed that there was a reason for the shift.

“He’s male,” Dat said. “At least according to my skill. I guess there’s always a question of whether or not it’s talking about gender. It might refer to sex. And I don’t know if it responds to someone who –”

“Not the time, Dat,” Sadie said.

“Oh. Right.”

“Can you hold him there?” Elijah asked again.

“For about an hour,” Dat answered. “Using that skill drained me, though. He’ll recover after that, and I won’t be able to do anything about it.”

“Fair enough,” Elijah said. “I need to study him. Just let me know when he’s about to break free.”

Then, he mentally dove into the task of memorizing the Druid’s pathways. He knew that those complex patterns represented quite a hurdle, and he’d been incapable of progressing to the second stage of Soul cultivation until he’d cleared it. And even though he’d been concentrating on reaching the Jade stage of Mind cultivation, he wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to ease his future path. So, he spent the next half hour meticulously studying the Druid’s pathways and committing them to memory.

But he quickly discovered that he was incapable of understanding even a small portion of that network. It didn’t even resemble a tree, as he’d expected. Instead, it was comprised of billions of tiny nodes, each one connected via a series of thin threads that Elijah likened to the human nervous system. Though that description was woefully insufficient to describe the sheer complexity on display.

Then it hit him. What he was looking at was closer to a fungal colony – as represented via those ethereal pathways – than anything resembling a plant. However, it was far more complicated than any colony Elijah had ever seen, which suggested that the Druid was further along the path of cultivation than he’d thought.

“You are a rodent staring up at the stars and pretending to understand the complexities of the cosmos,” rasped the fallen Druid, his mouth unmoving. He swallowed, “It took me centuries to reach this point. You will learn nothing from studying me.”

“Why?” Elijah asked.

“I will not be judged by the likes of you. I did what I thought necessary. The World Tree turned its back on us, and in my search for the power to save my people, I found new sources. Better sources. The system will turn on you, just as it turned on us.”

“This…this is a perversion of nature,” Elijah said, gesturing to the chamber. The once-living ice had frozen over, completely inert after it had been destroyed by Elijah’s Nature’s Rebuke spell.

“There is no such thing. If it exists, it is nature. I –”

One of his fingers twitched. Elijah barely noticed it before Sadie’s sword descended, hacking through the Ka’alaki’s neck and severing his head. It rolled free with a disgusting squelch, spilling pale blood into a puddle on the floor.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“It recovered faster than normal,” she said, already wiping the blood from her blade. “We couldn’t risk it recovering.”

“Him.”

“What?”

“Not ‘it’. Him. He was a person,” Elijah stated.

“I know. That…thing was cloaked in evil stronger than anything I’ve ever sensed,” she said. “It lingers, even now.”

Elijah shook his head. He wanted to understand the Druid, to discover how any servant of nature could have ever fallen so far. But the answer was simpler than he wanted to admit. It came down to priorities. Their world had been excised and cast adrift, and the Druid did what he thought he had to do to protect his people. He’d sacrificed his principles, twisting them to fit a narrative that let him sleep at night, all in service of what sounded like an impossible goal.

Had it driven him mad?

Maybe. Or perhaps he’d epitomized sanity and made the only viable choice he’d seen. Elijah would never know. But what he did know was that the Trial was far more complicated than he’d first thought. Not only were there still seven challenges out there, as well as the Immortals and their enigmatic leader, but two separate factions of natives as well. Added to that were the wraiths and the world’s hostile wildlife, creating a perfect storm of danger that would likely kill more people than anyone expected.

Elijah sighed.

He’d come into the Trial knowing it would be difficult, and he was fine with that. To him, it had seemed like a more elaborate tower. Yet, it was clear that it was far more than that. Sure, there was a possibility that the entire planet was populated the same way towers were, but Elijah didn’t believe that was true. This was a real planet, with real people, all with real problems.

And they’d been pitted against one another – natives against Trial-takers from Earth. There was no script to follow. No secret passageways to discover. No easy ways to defeat the powerful. In fact, Elijah only had to remember the dizzying complexity of the Druid’s pathways to recognize that each and every one of the beings on the planet was far stronger than anyone on Earth. Not surprising, given that it had been scarcely more than five years since the World Tree had touched humanity. But it was a grim reminder that the challenges could very well end up far too dangerous to conquer.

“It’s the Shackles, bro.”

“What?” Elijah asked, looking back. He’d been staring at the Druid’s headless corpse for some time.

“That’s why he didn’t obliterate us,” Dat explained. “My skill says that it restricts them to the first realm. He was almost level five-hundred, but he didn’t feel too much stronger than you.”

“He was.”

“What?”

“Stronger,” Elijah answered. “A lot stronger. His cultivation alone put him on a higher tier of power.”

“I think the bosses are supposed to be at the peak of the Mortal Realm,” Dat said, using another gaming term to describe the leaders.

“That makes sense, I guess,” Elijah said, still feeling a bit melancholy about everything he’d witnessed. But one thing was absolutely clear – if they wanted to conquer the challenges and overcome the Trial, they would need to get a lot stronger. They were all among the most powerful people on Earth, but they still had a ways to go before they reached the peak of the realm. He looked up at Dat, then shifted his gaze to Sadie and Kurik before saying, “I think we need to get serious about progression.”

“That ain’t what we been doin’?” Kurik asked.

“We’ve been going through the motions,” Elijah said. “But I’m talking about really focusing on cultivation, on pushing for more levels. This planet is going to kill us if we’re not at our absolute best.”

“I agree,” Sadie said. “Starting with the reward.”

The moment she’d decapitated the Ka’alaki Druid, a familiar white box had appeared nearby. It looked identical to the one that had contained the Seed of the Whistling Wind, though, at nearly ten feet wide and almost as tall, it was far larger. Because of the chest’s size, Elijah was forced to adopt his guardian form, then let Dat climb onto his shoulders just to open it. And when they did, they all received appropriate notifications:

Congratulations for conquering the Challenge of the Ice Fortress. Progress: 2/9

Reward: Trunk of the Frozen Oak

When Elijah climbed to the lip of the open chest, he looked down to see that the reward was precisely what the name suggested.

“I was expecting a trunk, like a treasure chest,” Dat said. “Maybe filled with jewels and coins. Not…a tree.”

The trunk resembled those Elijah had seen in the subterranean forests, especially in regards to its crystalline structure. However, where those trees had been an amalgamation of roots and living ice, the trunk inside the chest was clearly a single organism. It didn’t look all that dissimilar from the ice sculptures – or frozen people, Elijah amended – they’d just fought. Though when he peered at it via the senses granted by One with Nature, he was comforted to find that it felt like a normal – if powerful – tree.

“What does it do?” Sadie asked.

Elijah shrugged. “I don’t know, but it’s still alive,” he said. “I bet if Nerthus got ahold of it, he could create an entire forest of ice trees.”

“Nerthus is your tree friend, right?” asked Dat.

“Spryggent. Kind of a tree spirit made of twisted branches and roots.”

“Cool, bro.”

“What do you mean when you say that we need to take progression more seriously? Do you have a plan?” Sadie asked.

“I mean that I’m going to build my cultivation cave, and everyone here is going to take advantage of it,” he said. “Plus, I think we need to find a real Healer. I’ve been doing okay with it, but we’re not taking advantage of my full skillset.”

“We should grind, too,” Dat suggested.

“What do you mean?”

“Set up somewhere, kill everything we find,” he replied. “Boring, but it’s the best way to get experience.”

“I…I don’t know how I feel about that,” Elijah admitted. Killing was part of life, but the only time he’d gone a quest of extermination – at least outside of towers – was when he and the hunters of Ironshore had tried to starve the orcs by killing all the prey animals in the area. That hadn’t left him feeling particularly good about himself, and he never intended to repeat those actions.

“We’ll focus on wraiths,” Sadie said. “They’re not strong, and individually, they don’t give a lot of experience. But we can kill a lot of them, especially with Kurik’s traps and your area abilities.”

“Fine. But first, we need to get this hunk of tree back to the Nexus Town so we can figure out what to do with it,” Elijah said. Then, a notion occurred to him. “Wait…scratch that. I think I have a better idea.”

“What?” asked Sadie.

“You’ll see. But I’m going to need everyone’s help here. It’ll be a pain, but you’ll thank me when I’m done,” he said.