Palefang likely hadn’t tolerated the presence of other superpredators like himself, and so I knew I was in for a slow harvest, made slower by the fact that I couldn’t trigger a second convergence.

I had to curse him. I’d have always had to build up my physical attributes, but because of him I’d gone all-in on them. If I had a bit more [Focus] right now it would be much easier to extend my gaze and find creatures to kill. This whole process would be faster.

I treaded lightly through the mists for a while so that I could get a closer look at one of the tiny, bipedal lizards that I kept seeing scurrying around everywhere. It had a long beak, and as I watched it leaned down and stuck a long, thin tongue into the crevice at its feet, either lapping up some of the thick moss that grew there or searching its contents for whatever its food of choice was—possibly small insects.

“You’re a clever little fellow, aren’t you?” I murmured before shooting it through with an arrow and scaring away all of its kin. It gave a negligible amount of essence, but I wanted to see if it had a nearby parent watching over it.

None came, and I moved on in disappointment, soon finding a stretch of slope that was dominated by clusters of large, jagged rocks that jutted out of the ground, each of them overgrown by a tangle of thick, green vines. The vine was covered in dark, many-pointed leaves that glowed with veins of reddish light. Small pink flowers dotted its twisting coils.

I saw with my gaze that small, dense patches of mana had gathered around these flowers, and that they swirled with more of the characteristic frenetic energy that marked primeval mana than the mana in the air around them.

Then I heard scuffing and skittering noises in the mist, and moved forward to investigate, detecting a great many tiny, four-legged creatures crawling across the rocks ahead with my [Wild Bond]. I saw their tiny shadows in a flash of lighting and moved toward them, intrigued.

As I wandered deeper into the vine-covered rocky outcrops, a few of the tiny, crab-like creatures came into view. Each of them appeared as little more than four spindly legs supporting a spiraling, iridescent cone of a shell. They darted here and there over the vines, avoiding the flowers and the mana around them to lick up little beetles that crawled over the leaves with long, thin tongues.

There were more than a hundred of the skittershells ahead of me, all of them moving between the vines. I took a few more steps into their midst, then sensed another creature at the edge of my gaze, something much larger. I focused a moment to extend my gaze in its direction, soon sensing a second one just behind it.

Both of them were walking through the densest part of the skittershell swarm, slowly moving toward me. Soon I could see their shadows moving amidst the rocks—they looked like pony-sized spiky pyramids.

There was a flash of orange light near one of their shadows, and a bolt of fire streaked toward me a moment later. I evaded it, feeling the air sizzle as it flew past me, then took shelter behind a rock as two more followed it.

They were hurling fire. I could sense with my [Wild Bond] that they were animals, but they were manipulating mana more like elementals—forming a magical missile wasn’t something you typically found in beasts.

I came out from behind my rock to get a good look at them. They walked on four, stocky legs and had sleek, black fur. Their heads had the tapered snout of a badger, and they were throwing firebolts by opening their mouths, shaping the spell in their throats, then belching it out at me.

Most curious, however, was their armor—their humped backs were covered in shells taken from the skittering little creatures around them that had seemingly been fused to their bodies. The conical shells covered almost everything, including most of their legs and their foreheads.

I ducked back behind the rock. “You two are just fascinating,” I said, smiling.

Then I came back out with my bow drawn, surged [Strength], and loosed an arrow at the closest one’s forehead. It ducked its head at the last moment, but this didn’t matter: the arrowhead struck the edge of the shell and shattered it, sticking the creature through the skull.

+ 2382 Essence, [Armor 1 / Fire 1 / Life 1]

The second one let out a hideous moan before I put it down, too.

+ 1938 Essence, [Armor 1 / Fire 1 / Life 1]

Once they were both dead, the skittershells around me scattered—perhaps they’d been held in place with [Wild Bond]? I walked past the carcasses and extended my gaze to look for more, but found none. The little flowers that grew from the vine didn’t have any mana gathered around them once I got a few steps behind the dead creatures, however, which led me to believe that the armored firebelchers had been drinking it up.

“Interesting,” I said, leading down to examine one. It had not only closed its petals, but the vine around it was blackened and burnt. Somehow they responded to fire.

In any case, [Fire] keys were highly valuable both to deter wildlife and for industry. The fact that we could apparently get them without having to delve for fire elementals was a blessing: fire elementals were horridly dangerous, even for elementals. On Aranar we had bought our [Fire] keys from Thanaxians rather than delve for them ourselves.

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I moved on, walking clear of the flower-studded vine and the jagged, upthrust rocks that it stretched across, keeping my ears and gaze open. Mostly, I found more of the tiny, moss-eating lizards that I guessed were what the cats ate.

Then a group of the little moss-eaters appeared at the edges of my gaze, running toward me, fleeing something. I tensed a moment later: I could hear it in the mists, but not sense it with [Wild Bond].

I crouched, ready to evade any sudden attack, then waited as I heard muffled grinding and scraping noises from the mist ahead of me. A strange silhouette appeared, one that may as well have been the shadow of a junkpile, just a tall lump with jagged contours.

Cautiously, I approached until its figure emerged from the mists.

Bones, vines, rocks, decomposing animals—seemingly anything was stuck into the outer layer of the mound and partly absorbed into a wet, viscous layer of transparent slime that had me wondering if it was related to the ooze that I’d seen earlier.

I felt it reach its claim out into the air around it, and farther into the earth beneath us—but while it pushed hard against my own claim to take the stones beneath my feet, my attributes were far too high for it to have any chance of succeeding.

I heard a sharp crack, followed by a volley of stone shards from the creature. I leapt back as they hissed through the air and burst into dust against the slopes behind me, then kept moving until the volley stopped, a distance of more than sixty feet, so far that I could barely see its outline in the mists.

Then I reached out, shaping my claim to grab the air before me and then channeling the airborne mana that I found there. I added some of my own mana to form a line, pushing my claim into it with the help of my [Lightning Magick], laying mana and then claiming the space I had lain it in as fast as if I were laying the cobbles of a city street as I rode over them. My line of mana reached the air just before the creature and stopped—I could push my claim no further.

Then, with a practiced thought and a blaze of sudden sound and power, I ignited the mana, striking the creature with a deep red lightning-bolt. Through the mists, I watched half of the detritus in its outer layer of ooze fall away with a series of rough crashing noises.

?—Mana 205/600, 40% Primeval

It fell forward, then began to lurch toward me with much greater speed than it had before. Now that it was free of much of its outer layer, I saw more slime undulating beneath the remaining hunks of detritus.

Several more volleys of stone shards shot from the creature, now with better aim, but I avoided them by running in a circle around the it, lunging with [Surge of Might] whenever another handful of stones was coming my way and channeling mana out of the air and into my body the whole time. I found a small boulder and took cover by laying flat against the ground behind it, then checked my mana:

?—Mana 451/600, 40% Primeval

I began to form another line of mana, bending it to strike the ooze—there was no need for me to have line of sight when I could simply use mana to reach around things.

I cast the lightning bolt, causing the air around us to flash as the sound of my spell boomed out across the slopes.

?—Mana 82/600, 40% Primeval

I stuck my out to take a look at the creature in time to see it eject all of its outer layer of detritus, then flop forward and begin to drag itself toward me with alarming speed. A moment later I ducked for cover as several more stones came hurling my way.

I struck it with another lightning bolt, glad now that it was coming toward me—less distance meant less mana. It shuddered, and there was smoke billowing off its amorphous form when I looked a moment later to see that it was still lurching toward me.

I made a disappointed noise, then surged my [Strength] and bolted from behind my boulder, running away to more distant cover while I channeled more mana into my body. But like pretty well everything else I’d met, this elemental ooze was slower than I was, and so I had an easy time leaving its range, absorbing a few hundred more mana, and then returning and striking it with another lightning bolt.

This one had the desired result—the heap of ooze collapsed, becoming nothing but a smoking puddle that spilled out over the rocks.

+ 3180 Essence, [Earth 2 / Elemental 2 / Body 2]

“Hassina will appreciate this, I’m sure,” I said. There was an argument to be made for breaking the boon and using the [Elemental] key to upgrade my lightning, but I’d only do that if I found it absolutely necessary.

Still… I’d had to hit that thing four times with lightning bolts. It had taken me almost thirty seconds to kill it. Sure, I’d done essentially nothing with my levels or skills to support [Lightning Magick]... but it was still lightning.

I kept moving along the slopes, once again finding the cliff’s edge, but this time following it as I made my way back. Soon I was looking down at a familiar view: the lights of the great trees, appearing almost like the lights of a city seen through a cloud. I even found the wall of crawling vines that led down to the very ledge I’d stood upon when I first took in this new world. Lightning still flashed intermittently, revealing the shadows of distant mountains.

A thought occurred to me as I looked down at the vines and thought of my earlier journey:

The flowerfall.

A hive of insects had been guarding the massive wall of strangling vines that I’d seen earlier. If I wanted a dense cluster of essence, then a hive of flying insects that occupied a gorge which was over half a kilometer deep was a safe place to look. I knew where it was in relation to our cave, now. And it was close enough that I could get back to the cave fairly quickly if I needed to.

As for the flowerfall… the vines themselves had been feeding on creatures brought to them by the insects. I’d hate to destroy such a thing of beauty, and I’d certainly have to be careful going about it… but the vine structure would likely yield a strong bounty, especially if it was all one entity. Destroying it was at least worth looking into.

I could hunt birds in the crowns of the great trees when I had at least one [Air] key and a skysail to take me back up to the cave quickly in case of emergency. For now, I was hunting essence—and I’d thought of a good place to find some.