Sitting up after two hours of getting my body healed and put back to rights, I looked at the trunk behind me. I mumbled, “I need a better plan.”
The gargantuan trunk of the World Tree at this point was as thick as a house and all I needed right now is a room, somewhere I can sleep, mentally recover, and plan for the week. Putting my hand on the rough bark, I began pushing with my Nature Sorcery and channeling most of the flow of my power amulet into the tree. A small opening began to form, just big enough for me to slip into. I kept the power going until the small cavern was roughly ten-feet by ten-feet. Shuffling in, I closed the wood around me until I was sealed inside, leaving only a few air holes.
I pulled out a flashbang pebble and modified it to be a gentle light emitting pebble only, setting it in the middle of the wooden room. My very own treehouse! A little sparse, but a great bolthole for tough times, like now. I gingerly stripped off all of my gear to take stock, my hands shaking as I changed the focus of my power amulet to pump me full of energy to make sure my personal stores of power were topped off.
Focusing on the amulet, I reworked it until it was as shielded as I could make it. Still unable to relax, I turned my attention to my gear. My batteries were empty and the enchantments on them were coming apart at the seams. Gungnir was the only thing in perfect condition. It had even absorbed some of the starlight and divine energy from that blast.
Flecks of dense white power floated through the Chaos crystal shards. The platinum shield was surprisingly messed-up. The center of it had a huge dent and the bottom part was sagging as if it melted and then cooled really fast.
My normal weapons that were strapped to my legs - my knife and ax - were bent out of shape from the heat and concussive waves. They were completely useless, mostly chunks of unusable material. The regeneration enchantment had put me back into somewhat of a normal condition but my hair was missing. All of it. No eyebrows, chest hair, head or pubic hair - all gone.
I conjured a large stone pillar, five-feet tall and three-feet in diameter, and made sure it was in the center of the room, then used Nature Sorcery to sink it down into the wooden floor. Only the top two-feet of it remained visible. I spent twenty minutes conjuring a chunk of gold and then shaped it to cap the stone pillar. Breathing deep to still myself, I then began adding the matter-to-mana equation enchantment to the thick golden cap. Another ten minutes were spent perfecting the enchantment so that no weak spots could be found, sinking my will into it and soaking the structure of the enchantment with mana until it sank down and spread throughout the stone cylinder.
Making sure I incorporated the lessons of the past, I was meticulous in designing the failsafe enchantments and the output governor so that nothing could go wrong. As I turned it on to idle and output the lowest level of mana, the enchantment coursed through the stone pillar and ate it, slowly breaking down the matter and converting it into raw mana. Even though the process was too slow for the human eye to detect, I could estimate that this generator would last for a few centuries. I’d have to test it at different output levels to be sure but it was so damn efficient.
My Mana Sorcery confirmed that this new power generator was several times more powerful than the three in my basement combined, as it had a gold enchantment controller to increase the efficiency by a factor of five and the size of the cylinder was scaled up to increase output as well. With this, I opened up the tap of power and let it flow to me.
Time to get some work done.
First, I pulled in as much energy as I could handle and got to fixing my body, every bit of it. My Flesh Sorcery came with natural regeneration which drank up the flood of energy, but I set about pointedly taking care of all the stubborn aches and pains that just wouldn’t go away.
An hour of painstaking concentration and detail work went by before I took a break. Miniscule fragments of poisonous burning energy had implanted themselves in my bones, searing me from the inside out. Each of those little bits had to be physically carved out of my body. As each individual piece fell to the wooden floor with a bit of blood spatter, I sank them into the floor of the World Tree room and watched as they were subsumed by Yggdrasil.
Shaking my head to make sure I didn’t feel any more pain, I moved on to Gungnir after one last scan of myself. Picking up my staff, I channeled the full outflow of the generator’s energy to Gungnir to make sure my best weapon was fully charged.
After watching intently for ten minutes, I noted that I couldn’t really see the full limits of Gungnir’s energy storage potential. It appeared to be bottomless. Laughing a little bit internally, I decided to just make a link between the two and let half of the generated energy go to Gungnir as the other half of the output was more than enough for my needs. Up to this point, I had been more than enough of a threat to anything that came my way except for the deity level crap.
I need an overflow. What do streets do when gigantic storms come through? They have ditches and sewer systems to divert the excess. With this in mind, I banished all of my armor and recreated it; this time it was all bone. I took the time to carve runes underneath each piece, and then in each rune I slowly conjured enough silver to fill them up. On top of each bone piece, I conjured a thin layer of diamond, carved more runes, then inlaid gold runes into the diamond plate. After I was satisfied with that effort, I then fashioned a thin layer of diamond on top of that. Each piece of armor was going to be its very own full-on shield like my previous gauntlet.
[Layers, I need layers.] I thought. [If it’s good enough for ogres, it’s good enough for me.] I laughed and kept on working. The runes I had shaped and reinforced with precious metals were all control runes with conditional enchantments for various scenarios.
I had discovered earlier that diamond was capable of holding exponentially more energy than the basic quartz-like crystals which I had been using, due to the dense nature and ordered structure of the diamond. The runes I placed on top of the diamond parts mainly dealt with anti-shearing so the crystal wouldn’t shatter from a piercing blow, and other runes dealt with sealing and storing excess energy. The fundamental bone layer at the base held enchantments of diverting concussive forces, my main weakness right now. It also held the silver runes to handle the overflow of energy, which would be diverted to Gungnir, or if I didn’t have my weapon, to the main batteries.
I then covered the top of every bit of the armor in a thin plate of black, cold-iron and layered enchantments of dispelling in it and made it permanent with etched runes. The purpose of the dispelling layer was to unravel the structure of spells coming at me, such as turning an exploding fireball into a weaker fireball that didn’t explode or a hurled icicle into a bolt of water. Its only function is to siphon out energy from incoming hostile spells.
Every piece of my new armor was covered on the top or bottom with runes of reinforcement, energy intake and diversion, kinetic force intake/conversion to energy/, and growing/banishment. As they lay in front of me, I was presented with the quandary of binding them all together. I wanted this suit of armor to be greater than the sum of its parts. Parsing through my Mana Sorcery instincts, I came across several viable ideas. However, I immediately discarded the first one. Tearing off tiny pieces of my soul and slapping them to each piece seemed like a really bad idea.
Option number two was also ignored pretty quick as well. This one advised me to create a bunch of extremely simple consciousnesses modeled after my own and copy them out over and over while burning the smaller minds into each piece of armor so that they stuck there. Then make a more complex consciousness, again modeled after my own but slightly more complex than the other ones, and have that one extend tendrils of logical connection to control the others. It seemed a bit too complex and reliant on my burgeoning telepathic capabilities which I was hesitant to use on something this necessary to my survival.
I liked the third path the best, the more ethereal concept of sympathetic magic, the notion of symbolic linkage. Its roots however were firmly lodged in the area of my Flesh Sorcery. Basically, removing a small piece of a greater whole means that the small piece is still technically a part of that bigger piece, just removed temporarily. If my hand gets cut off in battle, the marvels of modern medicine provide an avenue through surgery to stitch that limb back together making it whole again. The hand is still mine, it’s just not attached. The same concept applies in magic. These sympathetic links, or metaphysical connections, still exist in some fashion for some time after the parts are separated.
Using this concept as a framework for my project, it means I can use sympathetic magic to bind pieces together so that they function as a whole. I’m following the ‘evil-witch-binds=voodoo-doll-to-person’ ritual in reverse. I’ve heard warnings in fiction about letting evil witches get ahold of your hair or trimmed nail bits. They can curse you or cast spells on you from a distance because they have something that was a part of you but isn’t physically connected. The voodoo doll is connected to you by virtue of having your hair tied into the doll, but I’m doing it in reverse.
I conjured a forty-five foot length of thin thickness copper wire and coiled it around my arm. Once it was long enough, I divided it up into three equal lengths of roughly fifteen feet. Braiding them together and then using Earth Sorcery to bind them tightly together enough so that I couldn’t pull them apart with your fingers but not to the point that I couldn’t tell that they used to be three individual pieces.
“Damn instincts,” I grumbled, running waves of mana through the copper cable. I couldn’t feel anything here, nothing to show me that it provided the necessary symbolic weight I needed to then break apart and bond to the armor pieces. “What am I missing? Something’s missing, but what?!” I exclaimed, barley cracking some of the cable like a whip in frustration.
A slight burr on the cable caught the tip of my finger. A jolt sparked from my finger through the crimson smear and the embedded mana crackled, evaporating the drop of blood. Squinting in disbelief, I ran this observation past my Mana Sorcery. Blood turned out to be an excellent ingredient in binding because blood is similar to itself but it’s also an avenue of binding and binding to me. Putting in a pain block, I barely opened a vein and spread the dribbling stream down the braided cable. I watched with fascination as the mana-charged cable crackled as the blood evaporated from top to bottom. Feeling a bit faint, I used Flesh Sorcery to force my body to seriously step up red blood cell production.
Seizing the moment, I wove an enchantment of bonding and unity into the copper cable, then severed the cable into hand length pieces. Each individual piece was then placed underneath each piece of armor and shaped to fit the entire bottom to create a sympathetic bond between them. Quickly healing my hand, the cable pieces hummed in unison.
Grinning in triumph as I felt the cable pieces and armor parts truly meld together, I held my hands over the entire set of armor and pumped as much energy into each piece as it could take, channeling as much as I could handle from the power generator. Waves of power crashed down, a veritable waterfall inundating my creation with the necessary mana to force all of the enchantments to meld together. Now each piece would be more powerful together than they would be by themselves, a complete set of badass armor worthy of any sorcerer-king!
With the whole set fully charged, I took my time and attached each piece very carefully to my clothing that probably needed to be replaced. My jacket and boots were looking worse for the wear and the jeans were starting to come apart. But being armored felt great . . . felt safe. As soon as I had every piece where it needed to be and reshaped a few so that they fit more comfortably, I did my best to keep everything attached by growing a small vine from one of my rose seeds around my body so that it secured everything to my tattered clothes.
“Find more duds, find some food . . .” I complained, keeping my voice to a whisper. “Feels like I’m starting from ground zero again. What’s next? Hot naked zombies and cloudy with a chance of meatballs? Puh-leeze.”
A quick pulse of Nature Sorcery after taking a few deep breaths allowed me to place a small hole in the tree trunk so that I could see if night had fallen. The sky outside was black. Only the light of the stars and waning moon allowed me to see the outlines of the trees and houses further away. Closing the hole, I cheated with my Flesh Sorcery and put myself in a deep sleep.
*******
I woke up six hours later, hyperventilating. Dreams of white fire burning away everything until only my soul was left hovering over a barren world. I shaped a hole in the trunk, needing to breathe, needing space.
“Hey neighbor!” Rath’s fat head popped into the hole I just made, scaring the living daylights out of me! I landed on my ass, scrabbling backwards before I truly remembered where I was. “What, don’t like me anymore?”
“YOU! USELESS SCALY SHIT!” I screamed, picking up Gungnir and shaping a human sized hole in the tree to step out of. “You didn’t do shit! You don’t deserve shit! You should be strung up by your tail and eaten by ME!” I was pointing Gungnir at Rath, my Sorcery making small branches grow up from the tree branch and wrap around the lizard, encasing him in a cocoon with only his head showing. “You got a lot of fucking nerve showing up after not helping AT ALL!”
“What do you want from me, dumbass?” He angrily squeaked at me, tilting his head. “You’re the moron who decided to bring a goddess here and held her paladins hostage. Not to mention you basically brought this completely on yourself.”
He’s right, but that’s not exactly how it happened.
I can’t kill kids. Even psycho religious ones. And, I was trying to show them that I wasn’t the zombie maker, and if I could have accomplished that, then maybe I could have made an ally in this damn freaky time. Fuck me! I was so angry all the time lately, mainly at myself, because the goddamn lizard was right. I was dumb and made some epically stupid decisions. I brought all of this on myself. Fine, fuck it. I need to focus my anger towards constructive solutions.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I growled, frustrated at myself. “Fine! I’m too angry to be thinking too many rational thoughts right now. So . . .you’re old as shit. How do I get more powerful?” What are some of the ways that wizards and sorcerers of old became so damn powerful that they could seal off this Earth to its own dimension?”
The labrador-sized dragon was silent for a minute as he puffed out a few smoke rings. His pondering stretched into two minutes, and then three. “I will help you become a huge dragon again?” I wheedled, grimacing at how that came out. “Maybe a little source of personal mana all for you, if you answer all of my questions?”
“Fine.” Rath quickly agreed, maybe a little too quickly. “Anything is worth being big again.”
“Tell me, what did they do to get a leg up?” I asked, raising one eyebrow. “And give me details.”
“Well, some of them put runic tattoos on their body, some permanent but usually temporary. This practice was fairly common for them because it allowed them to activate complex battle spells in an instant. Others forged pathways or extra ‘containers’ in their body or soul to store more mana than a ley line. I believe this was a practice called ‘false core creation’ and ‘meridian enhancement’.” He answered, using his tail to tick off imaginary lines.
“A more sought after path that required far more time were arcane researchers and their never ending hunt for ways to incorporate bloodlines of mythical beasts for strange and powerful abilities. A wider path walked by more clever magicians were crafted weapons that the gods themselves would be jealous of, and an extreme few with little hope bargained for power at the feet of devils and daemons, sacrificing their fellow man for temporary scraps of fell power. Much more common was the self sacrifice of power to gain divine favor and leadership amongst a flock of worshippers. Some of them even learned to cultivate from the Daoists of the High East.”
“Ok, but what did sorcerers do to get more powerful?” I pressed, knowing that there was a lot in that compact head of his.
“Well, sorcerers faced more of a learning curve as opposed to a power curve. It was fairly popular to make pacts with elementals of their particular type, although each bargain was different. Fallen sorcerers adhered to the practice of ‘devourment’, defeating and consuming the broken souls of other sorcerers to gain their flavor of Sorcery. Some tamed creatures of the void or even joined with them to explore the vastness of space.”
“What?” I sputtered, clutching Gungnir so hard that it sparked out the top. “You’re telling me that someone can kill me and take my sorceries for themselves?!”
An entirely new side of evil and opportunity was just staring me in the face.
“You didn’t know?” Rath grinned wickedly. I just noticed how sharp and evil his smile was. “Real devilish types. The worst of them bargain the souls of innocents in exchange for Sorcery, and some for the ability to reincarnate at the cost of their current sorceries, and then come back life after life gathering bits and taking it from others until they have enough and are basically gods themselves. Takes a more than a couple millenia but it works.”
My face scrunched up in horror as Rath scratched his back against the rough bark of Yggdrasil. Laughing at my naivety in the face of cosmic horrors, he continued.
“It’s not all bad though. The most common way wizards would attempt to gain Sorcery is they studied broken portals with a skewed runic algorithm that dipped into the outer realm of Chaos. Sometimes, they would ‘fish’ through it to capture shards of solidified Chaos and if they succeeded, then they would attempt the perilous task of trying to merge with it using a grand ritual. Using the proper runic channel to feed the energy in the proper circuit combined with the right kind of focus and will, they were able to subsume the Chaos and gain their preferred kind of Sorcery. Several attempts are required to complete an attunement resulting in the grasp of an element, but it does work.”
I had a hard time following that. I seriously had a long way to go.
All of my plans sucked. Knowing what I know now just goes to show how little I truly know. [Damn, the beginning of wisdom does suck.] Complaining didn’t help. Thinking helps. Pondering, planning, using what I’ve figured out helps. [Which maybe means that I’ve actually stepped onto the path of wisdom.] My best play is to stall for time, or go unnoticed, which directly clashes with my desire to own this freaking state. The only thing in my way right now are deities.
“Rath, what sort of things do gods fear?” I asked quietly. “That’s my last question for now, I promise.”
“Each other.” His yellow eyes narrowed as his thin forked tongue tasted the air. “And places like this Earth before what you call the Ripple. Without mana, it’s very costly to manifest in areas of low density magic, and manifesting saps a lot of mana from the area before they do. Your house put out a ton of mana which then leaked a lot of mana into the surrounding area, and it also had elements of purity in it from the herbs when you planted the Seedling. It was a perfect place for that particular deity to appear, a personalized calling card if you will. The ley line also helped.”
Yup, realizing that I had crafted the circumstances of my own doom just made it worse. I am dumb. Ok, no more paladins, and if they come a’callin, then I’ll just bury them and dip. Dig and dive.
More immediate needs raised their mortal heads as my stomach growled at me. I need food and more than one secured place to lay my head. This bolt hole here in the World Tree works for now, but the best place would be to make a home under the river. My Earth and Water sorceries would make that a cinch, and who the fuck would look for me under a river?
My stomach growled at me again, forcibly reminding me that I also lost enough food to last me years. I used Flesh Sorcery to shut that shit down. I don’t need food right now, humans can last for days without food if need be. Keeping a small bottle of vitamins in a leg pocket was my contingency plan. I could conjure water, swallow the vitamins and last for quite a long while without food. The human body generally carries two months worth of fat on their waist. Damn America. We’re all fatties here.
Except for me. I stupidly got rid of my midsection’s survival pack.
“Hey!” Rath yelled, interrupting my thoughts. “Hold up your end of the bargain, gimme gimme gimme!”
Uhg. I conjured a small pebble and put two enchantments on it, one to absorb ambient mana from the area, and the other base enchantment was the power generator for the greedy lizard. Then I conjured some copper wire and made a necklace, which I put around his neck. “There, an endless stream of mana,” I huffed, making sure to tweak the flow to be as small as possible. “Decent output,” I lied with a straight face but continuing on, “and small enough to not attract attention. It’s also got an ambient mana soaker so that people don’t notice the bleed-off.”
I re-closed the bark behind Rath as he scampered off like a scared gecko and then fixed the rest of the branch I was standing on.
[Hmmmm, wire. Metal can be made thin enough to be turned into wire, which can be braided into cables for extra strength, like muscle fibers.] My thoughts wandered a bit as I took my time healing Yggdrasil’s branch. [Can I do the same with crystal? Or maybe I can create crystalline structures in my bone fibers, so that I am a living battery of mana, or so the overflow of energy/mana/kinetic force exerted on me will charge up my bones with power instead of hurting me?]
My thoughts did have some merit to them. The best example I have of this is the blending of materials that took place when I made Gungnir. Speaking of that staff, I’ve had it charging all night and never checked on its progress.
Gently touching it with my magical senses showed that it was still nowhere near full. The three runed elemental crystals and the Chaos shard still seemed to be a bottomless storage pit for power. I could crack a mountain in half with just the raw mana discharge alone, forget using it in a more efficient aspected way.
A stray thought hit me out of the blue. [Chaos shards! Shit!]
Thinking about the ones I had stored away in the stone box freaked me out - what if they hadn’t disintegrated from Astria’s blast? Leaving raw potential alone like that is not recommended.
[AH! MY WOMAN!] Another blast of panic gripped me for a few seconds as my brain skipped through and then combed back through the events of the past day.
Gungnir vacillated between red and yellow, mirroring my emotional state. “I mean, she moved out of the shell and into the tree a while ago, and the tree survived, but holy fuck me on a stick!” I exclaimed.
Man, I'm a bad fiancée.
I re-opened Yggdrasil’s trunk quickly but carefully and ran to the wall of the room that was closest to the heart of the tree and pushed everything I had into the center of Yggdrasil’s sapling. It felt beyond cavernous on the inside. I mean, it is a tree that manipulates space, which is just a subsection of time. My senses stretched far before they pinged off the golden and green ‘egg’ that I knew to be the burgeoning psyche of Elizabeth.
[Whew, she’s ok, she seems to have stabilized her position in the heart of the tree.] Now that I knew she was safe, I purposefully tried not to rush my preparations.
Ok, next priority.
I checked my new, upgraded armor. It was fully charged and ready to go. The various runes sparked as my power ran through the runic circuitry. Then I grabbed Gungnir, leaving it linked to the generator and giving it the full flow of mana. The link between it and the generator should automatically cut off if I get too far away. My staff seemed to shiver with excitement. “All right, you like the mana, I got it,” I cooed, petting the magical weapon. “Now let’s go see if your cousins are all right.”
I linked myself to Gungnir’s stores of energy, just in case I needed it, then opened the tree and slowly climbed down, checking my surroundings every few feet. Norn was keeping watch, but I didn’t trust the little bitch right now. He didn’t help during the last confrontation, or the one before that.
[I need to work on my magical mind domination for beasts.] Perfecting that tactic will give me so many options down the road.
Taking a look around at the landscape while I was up on a branch, I chewed on my lip and grimaced at the sight. Yup, still looked like a damn bomb went off. Blackened scars stretched out for a hundred yards in five directions, the biggest one in a direct line from where the angry goddess stood and where my home used to be. The other blasts simply annihilated anything in their path. Half of the road was gone to the west and the tree I’d picked the acorns near was evaporated.
Seeing nothing moving around, I slithered down to the gaping hole under the World Tree and began hunting around for the Chaos shards. I felt two immediately with my senses, and I pulled them from deep within the scorched earth. Stuffing them into a back pocket, I then spent the next thirty-minutes slowly searching the backyard, scanning every inch.
The blast would have sent them towards the alley behind my back yard. I found two more embedded in the neighbor’s trees and one in the house even further back behind the trees. I think some old lady used to live in that tiny house with blue shutters. Smoldering bits of demolished houses and vaporized trees littered the area stretching out at least sixty yards from where my backyard used to be. Two hours of painstaking searching did not lead to more easter eggs. Five shards would have to be enough for now.
Grimacing at my unintended consequences and feeling the tug of my Nature Sorcery vibrating with anger at the sight of such careless devastation, I set about repairing the landscape near and under the tree, conjuring dirt and rocks to fill in the hole. My Nature Sorcery happily encouraged grass and bushes to grow quickly over its new real estate while I set the world around me back to a nicer state. When I finished, Yggdrasil now appeared to have its own tiny hill to stand on. Maybe I could take a lesson from Mr. Tolkien and build myself a hobbit’s burrow, but nuclear silo style.
I went to my old backyard and began to dig downwards toward the main root of the World Tree. I kept going, banishing dirt and periodically turning the tunnel walls to stone for stability, until I was roughly sixty-feet down. Taking a second to crystallize my plan in my head, I began banishing more and more dirt and framing the walls with granite until I had formed a giant underground room to live in.
Copying the general plan from the arboreal room, I fashioned another oversized and over-powered matter-to-mana generator down here as well. I sunk it two-thirds down into the dirt and scooted it next to the main root spearing down from the new ceiling. With an ever present sense of paranoia, I very carefully put runes of concealment and misdirection all over the generator, so anyone looking down here wouldn’t see anything, their eyes and mystical senses glazing over my new living space.
Then I made another huge rectangular crystal battery and linked it to the generator, having the same rough plan as before.
“And every hobbit hole needs the basics!” I said, taking a short break to let the strain of so much mana channeling and concentration wane. Shaping a small side room to the east with a stone tub was a piece of cake but it did need a drainage chamber underneath it. The drainage area was molded out of bedrock and figuring out the ‘auto-banish’ runes took awhile. My Mana Sorcery kept telling me that it would malfunction if one drop of water splashed down the drain, forcing me to rework it with a sensory enchantment which was set to banish the drained contents whenever it got full past a certain point. And voila! Makeshift bathing area!
Feeling nostalgic, I went back to the main room and made a granite countertop just like my old house used to have. Elizabeth would love this ability of mine. I fashioned a stone plate off to the right, which, after putting a conditional heat enchantment on it, functioned as my frying pan. Now I need to get some food and steal a couple beds for my bolt holes, then work on the next part of my buff-me-up plan; tattoos!
******
Passing out after a full day of getting my ass handed to me and enchanting was not hard. Flesh Sorcery makes going to sleep and waking up too easy, as if I had perfectly planned out a schedule and stuck to it. No haunting thoughts could keep me up at night and no evil alarm clock to jolt me awake. Flesh Sorcery made it quick and painless. Casually silencing my hunger again, I prepared to face the day. A nearby 7-Eleven store would have plenty of canned food, and there were several of those around. I got out of the underground hidey hole and crafted another barge and hoverboard before I cautiously flew to the first one.
Gathering all the canned contents was easy, as I was on high alert and using Norn as a sentry and food pickup/dropoff. I repeated this for all of the gas stations I could find in the area, Quik Marts and 7-Eleven’s, filling up my living spaces with preserved food. That took most of my day as I also began knocking down the abandoned buildings.
Pointing Gungnir at various buildings and saying, “Knock that shit down” worked better than expected. The effects varied as I purposely kept my mind blank when I spoke to Gungnir. Sometimes the spear blasted out concussive waves of force or summoned a tiny but fierce tornado that casually ripped apart the decaying buildings. My own weapon gaining a kind of sentience is a little frightening but seriously fucking cool. I’ve even noticed it shifting forms to suit my mood. I really need to ask Rath about that later.
Returning to my newly dug underground home was a relief. A day without insane conflict or crazy deities was a good day. Pretty much everything had left me alone today. Probably due to the amount of power Gungnir was casually throwing around. I saw mutated cats and dogs running away from me as if I were an avenging demon while I traveled around, and plenty of smelly green goblins that scattered as Norn casually flew overhead shrieking to tell the forest that he was king. There were definitely more of the ugly green bastards than I expected.
Not wanting to think about it, I scarfed down two cans of beef soup, guzzled some water and lay on the floor of my new home. My head rested on the main root of the World Tree and Gungnir lay on my chest.
My senses kept giving me weird readings as the more I plumbed the etheric depths of Yggdrasil. Some things, maybe places? They felt far while others felt like I could just walk through the wood itself and find myself in a new land.
I figured that this tree is something of a Gate, a waypoint to other places. Norse mythology purports that the entire universe is held up by the great World tree, giving anyone who can travel on it carte blanche to the rest of the universe, or maybe even places nearby. One of my new goals was daily communion with this tree to try and see if I could figure out how to use it to get to places I want to go in the future. My cheat is the Nature Sorcery, which should (in theory) allow me to make this process way faster than a normal dude asking a tree to take him somewhere.
Meh, no luck today.
***********
My roving introspections took another turn as the day moved on. Blood. I need lots of it. I wanted to make tattoos on my body with cool runes for a whole bunch of things, but I need blood. Blood is the only substance I’ve come into contact with so far that can hold magical power of a specific kind for a long time and grant it to other things, specifically, in such a way that I can control.
And it can’t be my own.
If it is, my regeneration acts too quickly in my own defense thinking that I’m wounded. My auto-heal stuff will recognize it as my own and just reabsorb it into my body.
I know, I tried.
I spent hours with a pain block, bleeding and healing and then forcing inordinate amounts of mana into the bowl filled with my own blood (mixed with some dark plant juice and carbon to form a primal kind of ink) and then sticking myself with it over and over to get it to work. No dice. My Flesh Sorcery was just too good at identifying my own blood, even with all of the extras I mixed into it, and separating it out so it could be reabsorbed.
I concluded that I needed something different and powerful yet foreign like dragon’s blood to serve as a catalyst, but Rath fled from me when I approached him with a giant needle. I did think about using the sap from the World Tree because sap is in essence just plant blood, but I wasn’t going to jeopardize the development of this tree in any way.
My issue is also complicated by the fact that the mana levels of this world just weren’t dense enough for powerful magical creatures to live here yet. Basically, I’m either going to have to figure out how to travel to other worlds quickly to get what I need, or wait till Earth gets its big boy pants on and my ingredients for tattoos and bloodlines come here. And I really wanted to avoid other sorcerers right now, I’m just too damn young to play in their multiversal yard.
Fuck, I had more questions.
Putting that line of experimentation away for later, I conjured flat, gray stone over a big section of the wall to be my makeshift chalkboard. Then I conjured pencils of pure graphite and began to write out plans for power:
Runic Tattoos that need powerful magical blood for my skin and bones,
Find epic beast and somehow steal or assimilate a bloodline,
Make epic weapons of war,
Make a better home,
Find an elemental or creature to make into powerful familiar,
Travel far away and possibly learn to cultivate,
Merge muscles of my body with crystal/metal to upgrade durability and magical storage,
Learn how to use gates including the World Tree,
Find out how to use Chaos shards for more sorceries or expand applications of what I already have,
and last:
Figure out how to kill a fucking goddess.
Staring at my myriad options, I began marking ‘P’ for possible next to some of them and ‘TMW’ for too much work. Really need to start with the easier things; most of that shit was clearly in the ‘TMW’ category for now.
Since my two very basic hidey-holes were done, the World Tree bolthole and the backyard underground room, I needed to make a real living space combined with a bomb shelter. Deciding to make it cool but incorporate a bunch of utility, I went with the under-the-river idea.