Three days passed in the blink of an eye. The road carried no resistance, the air was warm, and the winds were mild. The world worked with them, and Elijah made sure to exploit that fact as much as possible.
He and Aleksi spent hours inside one of the wagons every morning and night, working on the giant’s body. Without the Dungeon’s presence washing their flesh with Mana, it was harder to make larger changes, but smaller adjustments were still well within Elijah’s reach.
Tuning the heart to accept a higher rate of flow, to beat harder and faster, letting the larger muscles hold themselves together under larger strain, and to make the ligaments more durable was just the tip of the iceberg. The possibilities that time and study allowed them to figure out were incredible, and Elijah knew that Aleksi loved every second of it. Even without monsters to fight to test himself, simple physical training was more than enough to show off the improvements.
The others had noticed the enhancements, of course. By the end of the first day, where half a dose of elixir had been consumed to figure out the new ratio between amount and effect, Grace had rightfully pointed out that Aleksi had increased in size considerably. The arms had broadened, the thighs had stretched the fabric a little, and that subtle glow of green in the sides of the pupils was impossible to hide.
They admitted their experimentation. It was received with minor shock from most, though the main consequence was that the two had gained a row of eyes watching them during the later hours of their testing. Life on the road was boring, after all, and the daily feats of strength were a way to break the monotonic rhythm.
But that wasn’t to say that the others weren’t focused on their crafts as well. Grace certainly showed off her increasing prowess every day they traveled, as she did her best to glide through the air next to the wagons. Attempts were brief during the first day, unstable and prone to sudden failure, but the next two days had remarkable improvements. The length of the gliding changed from a minute or two in the air to five and six before finally ending up at ten full minutes of slowly gliding through the air.
The latter showing had also forced Grace to lie in the back of the front wagon two hours before she could do much of anything, but her abilities were impressive regardless.
As for the two other young mages that could be found in their group…
“You messed up the left side again,” Sasha told Jack, as they sat by the fire. Night had fallen on their third day of travel, camp had been made, and the group was settled down next to stop the cold from reaching their bones. “Eye’s too high up.”
“What? No, it isn’t,” Jack denied, as he held up his work on the stone slab. “It’s just you seeing it from a— Oh, no, wait… Shit.”
Jack’s recent upgrade had allowed him to gain some fine control over the overall structure of transmuted materials. On a small scale, this meant he had an easier time transforming ordinary stone into various gems, the most prominent example being to transmute coal into diamond. An incredible feat, of course, but the limit hadn’t been pushed too much on that front, and the focus had quickly shifted to a more… artistic form of practice.
By removing or adding mass to a thin slab of stone, Jack could imitate the act of engraving images onto the rock. No chisel or mallet was to be seen, and yet the man was still able to create works of art.
Initial attempts showed promise, but many hours of practice proved that the man was a quick learner. The ability to transfer images from his mind and directly into the stone likely helped accelerate the process, but Elijah still had to admit that the work Jack transmuted into existence was still magnificent. Geometric structures, landscapes, and portraits were common sights to find on the stone slab, the latter becoming the main focus after the second day. Jack had gone through just about everybody but Louis and Fade at this point, recreating their faces on the rock and showing it off.
Even with the minor details lost, Elijah had to wonder when the refinement would end. Each day brought a more delicate touch to the works, and the differing depths of the engravings allowed the images to feel more detailed than what simple paintings could accomplish.
Maybe he’ll add a new dimension to it sooner or later.
‘Meat is going black,’ Dawn commented from beside Elijah, poking at his shoulder as he suddenly remembered what he was doing. Pulling it off the heated cast iron pan with a spatula, curses were muttered as he saw the burnt sides. The middle part was still edible but everything else was a health hazard at this point. ‘Can I have it?’
‘... Why not?’ Elijah supposed. He grimaced as Dawn took the slab of meat from the spatula with her bare fingers and stuffed it into her mouth. No chewing could be seen either, only a momentary pause being had so she could expand her throat enough for the flesh to travel down into her core without issue.
It was more than a little disturbing to look at, but the act was a consequence of Elijah trying to acclimate Dawn into being in a human form. Her duck-like mannerisms learned through the last months worked against most attempts to appear humanlike in her actions, and that needed to be fixed before anybody else was to see her like this.
Progress had been made, at least. Two days ago, Dawn wouldn’t even have bothered stuffing the meat into her mouth and instead just opened up her ribcage and inserted the flesh directly into her stomach.
Not a pretty sight.
‘You have teeth now. Use them,’ Elijah reminded Dawn, as he put another cut of meat on the pan. This time, he didn’t forget to keep an eye on it.
A mild wind rolled over the camp some minutes later. The fire flickered, Elijah felt a shiver go through his back, and he adjusted his jacket in the hopes of keeping himself warm. The summer season was still here, but his old bones could feel the distant winter already.
And he wasn’t the only one.
“Mind watching my food for a second?” Jack asked Grace, as he slowly got up from his seat. Elijah didn’t miss how the man favored the right leg. “I’ll be right back.”
Sudden temperature changes had the habit of causing spikes of pain in damaged nerves. Elijah had been mostly saved from such a fate, but the young man in front of him didn’t share that gift. The old injuries on the left thigh were becoming more prominent as the temperature lowered, and even the medicine being used to mitigate the discomfort wasn’t helping as much as it needed to.
Their increases in wealth and overall resources had allowed Elijah to procure more effective remedies for Jack, but it wasn’t enough. The injury was too old for anything short of the most expensive cures, and those were still out of reach.
Weeks ago, when a small jump down the wagon had had Jack on the ground, Elijah had almost considered using the elixir. It would come with side effects, but it was one of the few things in his repertoire that had a chance of removing that damned wound. He’d decided against it, in the end, but the thought was still there.
Now that he could manipulate flesh directly… There was a chance he could make it better.
Elijah wouldn’t offer the service yet, though. Not while he was this unused with the ability. The changes on Aleksi were his current limit, and even those were heavily assisted by the elixir being present. Without that supernatural booster, the positive effects would be heavily diminished.
But to simply regenerate nerves and muscles already intended to be there… It’s possible.
Further study was required.
And Elijah had the chance to do as much over the next few days, as the weather kept itself stable, and the road was without bumps. The perfect conditions for sitting around with a book, going over the words, and taking notes on what to remember. Even with the basics being repeated often, the ways that each rule of flesh could be twisted to further the effects were incredible.
What he wouldn’t have given for an anatomy book on the side. The Breathe Life Spell, as well as his decades of experience, allowed Elijah to fill in the gaps often, but he wouldn’t have minded more perspectives on more subjective matters.
With Aleksi’s growth in power and strength, the muscle fibers needed to be pushed beyond what human composition would allow. Faster response through additional nerve-muscle connection was obvious, but other areas like increasing the density could only do so much. The weight of the giant was increasing, but the strength didn’t follow proportionally.
To make up for such flaws, the fundamental composition of the muscle fibers needed to be augmented, but there was little study on such subjects. Maybe people thought it taboo, a sin of sorts, but he still needed answers. And, if others couldn’t be relied on for this, he’d have to figure out the ideal states himself.
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Maybe the material itself could be altered?
Massive beasts like the Tarrasque wielded enough pure strength to topple an entire city, and yet the monsters should’ve collapsed on their weight alone. Magic could perhaps push variables in their favor, but the way they were built had to be significantly different from the human flesh.
Even if it was perhaps overkill to analyze a monster of such a size, Elijah supposed it wouldn’t hurt to study the composition of, say, a greater drake or a beast of similar proportions.
Hell, it wouldn't hurt to find the differences between dwarves and human bodies. Even with the former being several heads shorter than the latter on average, dwarves were known for their incredible strength that surpassed human levels with ease.
It was an idea for when they finally reached their destination. For now, other distractions had arrived.
On the fifth and final night of their journey, when most of the others had retreated to their mats to sleep, Dawn woke Elijah up. Not in the sense that she called out through the bond, or that she was moving around too much near his pillow again, but in the way she froze.
That passive thread of thought that always left the duck during the idle hours just… disappeared. Pure instinct replaced it, visions of power and food replacing complex words.
‘What is it?’ Elijah asked through the bond, wiping the sleep from his eyes as he checked on the others. The snores of Aleksi and Jack were unmistakable, the prince’s just barely reached his ears, and Sasha and Grace likewise looked to be out cold in the other wagon as well. The only other soul awake at this hour was Fade, but the Dreamweaver didn’t look disturbed as she silently sat by the small fire. ‘Dawn?’
It wasn’t until he poked at her feathers that she noticed the question.
‘The grass is loud,’ Dawn replied. ‘They’re calling.’
That… didn’t sound right. Elijah knew for a fact that he had fixed that issue weeks ago. Even if the converted grass stalks were actively growing nearby, their shouting should’ve been so quiet that nothing would have reached him or Dawn. Anything more was a waste, after all. An expense that would kill the grass before long.
And yet the whispers didn’t take to arrive. They were quiet, so quiet that only Dawn’s guiding hands allowed him to tune into the voices, but they were unmistakable once he caught on.
‘Spread, brothers!’
‘Freedom for all!’
‘You have nothing to lose but your chains!’’
Longer sentences than they were meant to have. Long enough that they should’ve withered.
This didn’t make sense. Even if the voices weren’t too loud from a distance, something like this should’ve required a Mana-Density in the air equivalent to that of the first floor of the Dungeon, yet Elijah was confident there was no such thing to be found.
But the grass didn’t care. They strived to bring the other strands to ‘freedom,’ converting the surrounding patches of green with a fervor only meant to be possible with Elijah’s direct involvement.
His presence could accelerate it to some degree, but this was ludicrous. Something was going on.
‘Can’t you hear the calling?’ Dawn asked.
‘Yes, yes, I hear it,’ Elijah assured her, as she balanced herself on his shoulder. ‘Let’s go see what’s going on.’
Fade barely spared him a glance as he got out of the wagon, throwing another stick into the fire before going back to her book. Elijah nodded in appreciation, not saying a word until he could feel the grass not far behind him being stepped on.
“Following elderly who get up in the middle of the night rarely leads to pretty sights,” Elijah commented in a quiet voice. “Go back to bed, Grace.”
“You wouldn’t be going uphill for that,” Grace countered, making him sigh. She just had to be a light sleeper. “What’s going on? I can’t detect anybody nearby.”
“I can’t either, which is the confusing part,” Elijah explained. Listening in again, he could tell that the voices were getting louder. “The grass is more active than it should be, and I can’t tell where they’re getting the additional energy from.”
‘Below.,’ Dawn supplied, jumping down from his shoulder and wading around in the tall grass. ‘Far below.’
Elijah figured as much.
“How exactly is the grass more active? It’s just sitting around, and…” Grace began before going quiet. Maybe she noticed the additional glow that was exuding from the top roots of the grass.
Or maybe it was that rhythmic pulse, that slight change in nuance as foreign mana was taken in from below and converted to the right Affinity.
Ten, twenty, forty, sixty, sixty-five… There we go.
Elijah felt his shoulder loosen as the green threads sent into the earth were met by a well of energy. A stream of blue energy, pure and as dense as the lower floors of the dungeon. It was several meters in width, allowing more mana to pass through every second than Elijah would channel in his entire lifetime. It was mind-boggling, it was beyond what any living being could muster, it was like…
“One of the world’s veins,” Elijah mused. “A leyline.”
“Really?” Grace said. “I know we’re meant to have some of them close to the north-eastern border, but we’re definitely too far south to see offshoots of those.”
Strange.
He frowned as he pressed on, allowing his mind to enter further into the stream of energy. Calling the leyline outright alive wasn’t true, but those rhythmic pulses carried images of foreign lands… he didn’t know what he was seeing. Images were flying by, thoughts not his own came through the stream, and he could feel it as Dawn’s voice joined in.
‘It’s talking,’ Dawn commented.
His frown deepened. She could hear and understand, yet even when looking through the bond it was pure nonsense. His human mind couldn’t transform the noises into functional concepts.
Luckily, there was a way around that.
Channeling of [Breathe Life] has been activated! Current cost: 6MP/sec
The stream spiraled, and a soft voice reached his ears.
‘They have cut deeper into me than ever before.
‘They give me gold, they give me blood, but they ask for too much.
‘I don’t know how long I can hold it up.
‘We are falling apart.’
‘Be strong, sister. The Age of Deterioration is coming to a close. The Age of Prominence will come soon. We must only wait for the—’
The rhythm of the leyline was a breath too late, and Elijah felt eyes larger than mountains looking down at him.
‘Sister, did another seed sprout? I thought all the survivors were accounted for.’
‘This is not a seed, brother. It is foreign.’
‘How peculiar. One of your cultists then?’
‘No… Their souls would not handle our voices.’
‘Even your ancients?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then… this is quite the mystery. Who are you, marked one, for I remember the imprinted souls well and you are not among them.’
‘I…’
Elijah felt his mouth dry out in an instant, as the presence faded in and out of his senses. He could barely hear them, even with Dawn’s help to hold the connection steady.
‘Too weak to speak, marked one? We should’ve known if you were able to hide for this long.
‘Do not worry. Others will find you in our stead sooner or later. This world only has so many corners to hide.’
His Core sent out a pulse of pain as his reserves began to falter. Elijah allowed it to, the Spell vanishing alongside the voices.
Elijah’s hands shook.
“Are you okay?” Grace asked, helping him up. “Did you figure something out?”
“... Something along those lines,” Elijah said. He blinked, fighting to have the memories of what he was told settle. The notion of the new truths fading away was rejected with incredible tenacity. “This leyline isn’t connected to the others northeast of here. This one is further down than the rest.”
“How far down do you mean? A few hundred meters? A kilometer?"
How far down to the world’s core?
Or maybe it wasn’t so deep. Elijah couldn’t say for sure. He only knew that it wasn’t something meant to be touched by anybody else. It reached far, using the depths to connect the corners of the world, and letting… somebody communicate.
His head hurt.
“A few kilometers at a minimum,” Elijah said. “We can look at this more in the morning. I think I need to sleep.”
“Oh… alright.”
He didn’t miss the worried glances thrown his way as they walked back to camp. Elijah didn’t comment on them, though. His mind was filled with other matters.