Rieren did her best to survive the monster’s onslaught until she received some confirmation that its counterpart on the Ordorian mountain had been killed too. Unfortunately, she was running out of skill charges. Even at A-Grade, Fray Passage’s use was limited. She would run out of the skill some point soon.
“Why do you not fight back.?” the Anachron asked, throwing several icy spikes in her direction. “Come and die.”
Rieren was just thankful she could dodge some of the monster’s attacks without needing to resort to her movement skill. That was the benefit of having good stats.
Her Mind was high enough that she could both perceive the monster’s attacks as soon as they began and decide what her best course of action would be to avoid it long before it got close. At the same time, her Body stat was the highest of them all. It ensured that she was fast enough to follow the reactions that she deemed appropriate.
“Stay still,” the Anachron shouted.
Several misty tentacles crashed into Rieren’s location. They were tipped with little shards of ice. If she got caught, they would tear through her and make mincemeat of her flesh.
The Anachron was clearly getting annoyed at how Rieren was continuing to refuse to engage with it directly. She wasn’t attacking, but at the same time, she was certainly not allowing herself to be attacked either. They were stuck in a stalemate.
That was, until Kalvia arrived what felt like over an hour later. Batcat was accompanying her.
The Anachron had summoned its cloud again. This time, it indeed threw down a storm of hailstones, which Rieren would have found great difficulty in avoiding. Thankfully, Kalvia interrupted the monster before it could unleash its icy wrath.
“Hey, you!” Kalvia shouted. Her hand was coated with vines and roots twisting in on each other. “Over here, you Abyss-cursed pus-breather.”
That certainly got the Anachron’s attention. As it turned to redirect its aggression at Kalvia, it gave her enough of an opening to attack first. She threw something that looked like a large seed from her hand straight at the monster.
The throw didn’t look strong enough to hit her target. It hadn’t been flung hard enough. But then, halfway up its trajectory, the seed disappeared in sudden whirl of violet energy.
A second later, another purple whirl opened up right within the Anachron’s misty body. As soon as the seed reappeared, it exploded. A furious growth of roots and branches fired outwards in every direction, tearing and shredding through the Anachron’s body with ease.
Of course, it was going to survive a physical onslaught like that. Rieren wasn’t surprised. That was why she was already rising on her geyser again.
Once she was high enough, she summoned her Domain around her again. Her leap had been aimed so that her arc took her right over the exact spot the Anachron had been floating. Rieren flew in with all her Domain water in tow. A quick channelling of her Essence converted most of the water into steam.
She and her Domain crashed through where the monster was trying to reform. Not on her watch. Not this time.
The Anachron’s scream only lasted a bare second. When Rieren landed a few paces in front of Kalvia, the Anachron’s body was disintegrating above her. This time, it didn’t regenerate. They had killed both monsters at the same time.
“Here.” Kalvia tossed Rieren a storage ring.
Rieren caught it. “Thank you.”
She didn’t even have to peek into it for long. This was the reward promised by the Clanmistress for defeating the Anachron. She might not have killed the monster on her own, but it had certainly been her knowledge and expertise that had been vital to its death.
“How in the world did you figure it out?” Kalvia asked. “That there were two monsters constantly resurrecting each other?”
Rieren shrugged with a little smile. “You see a lot of strange things when you live as long as I have.”
She raised an eyebrow. “And how long is it that you ended up living?”
“Just over a century, by my last reckoning, though I think I lost count the last few years.”
Kalvia stared at her.
“I am guessing you decided to stay here, then?” Rieren asked.
Kalvia looked away as though she hadn’t really decided yet. As though saying it out loud was going to irrevocably brand it into truth. “I have decided to remain here for now, yes.”
“Why the change of heart?”
She stared at Rieren imperiously. “Who said my heart has changed?”
Rieren snorted. “Suit yourself.”
If they had been about to continue their conversation, they were interrupted by the appearance of the Anachron’s Beast Core. With another shimmer, the little misshapen heart-shaped amber stone dropped to the ground.
Before either of them could react, Batcat charged at it as though it was a real cat and had spotted a live mouse. It pounced on the Beast Core and immediately began munching on it.
“Does it… always do that with Beast Cores?” Kalvia asked.
“It is always ferocious when it comes to Anachrons,” Rieren said. “Now that I think about it, that might have been because it was hungry for their cores…”
Kalvia laughed softly. They watched the little Spirit Beast eating its way through the Beast Core for a moment.
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“What about the other monster?” Rieren asked. “Who took care of it?”
“Amalyse and Rollo volunteered,” Kalvia said.
“Have they decided already?”
“About whether to stay or leave? Well, I didn’t ask. That’s up to them.”
Rieren frowned at that. Rollo had been tight-lipped, but from Amalyse’s words, her remaining in the Shatterlands had hinged a lot on her ability to justify the potential gains for her clan by staying. Chief of those was her ability to assist the up-and-coming Empress, Kalvia. If she hadn’t decided to continue her stay in the Shatterlands, Amalyse would have been in a pickle.
That was not the case, however, lucky for her. It seemed Kalvia had unfinished business here too.
Batcat padded over after it was done eating the Beast Core. It burped slightly before hopping onto Rieren’s head.
She turned to Kalvia. “Will you be joining me in the Enlightenment Locale?”
“I suppose I ought to,” Kalvia said. There was the slightest hesitation about her, but then her face turned resolute. “Yes, let us get going.”
Rieren nodded and led the way. She hadn’t been expecting company on her cultivation, but it wasn’t going to be unusual at least. Kalvia had been with her under the streets of Falstrom.
The trip to the locale itself wasn’t long. They did have to climb some steep areas and walk along the edge of a sheer cliff, but it was otherwise uneventful. Kalvia seemed to be busy with her own thoughts, and Rieren wasn’t inclined to strike up a conversation unless needed.
It was obvious when they finally arrived. At the Enlightenment Locale, there was a tree where none should have been.
They had climbed past the tree line of the mountain. All they had now was snow and sleet. At least the snow hadn’t hardened to ice. Slipping off the mountainside now would have meant certain doom. But where the altitude and the resulting cold should have signalled the end of all trees, there was one more awaiting them at the peak.
Of course, it wasn’t a natural tree. It looked more like a stone column someone had artfully carved into a statue resembling a leafless oak.
However, where the rest of the land was submerged in a snowy blanket, this one was covered in ice. Spikes of translucent crystals grew off the rocky branches as though the frozen water was some kind of parasitic infestation.
They added a strange, ethereal quality to the tree. Dawn was still a ways off but things weren’t completely dark. The low moonlight glimmered through the icy formations, making the whole tree glow and gleam like it was some sort of mystic spirit. Rieren had a feeling that the light of day would glimmer through that ice with vibrant colours as well.
“I can sense… something,” Kalvia said. Her initial sight had been arrested by the strange tree awaiting them, but now she was looking around, noting the rest of the area. “It feels like we’re not even in the Mortal realm anymore. Sort of like the underground chamber, but much more intense.”
“I am going to guess you did not get past the Enlightened Realm, last time?” Rieren asked.
“I did. Just not here. Do you recognize it?”
“It is the Aether.”
Kalvia stared at her. Rieren ignored it and headed closer to the tree. The last time she had been here, she had belatedly discovered a pattern to the Vital Essence in this Locale. Rieren had found that the tree tended to attract a good deal of it, which meant cultivating close to it made the overall journey through the cultivation stage much quicker.
As she took her place beneath the large, stone branches wrapped in ice, she began to acutely feel the same thing that Kalvia was experiencing. The press of the Aether itself.
It made Rieren wonder where exactly the other woman had achieved her Enlightenment before. For the Enlightenment realm, one had to follow a strict set of Enlightenments for it to count.
Rieren, for instance, first had to get her Enlightenment about the way the world worked and the passage of time and the effect that her civilization had upon it. Then came the infinite cycle of death and rebirth, of creation and destruction from the tiniest grains of sand to the entire cosmos. And now, it was time for her next Enlightenment.
Which, as far as she recalled, involved the spark of life.
In the last timeline, Kalvia must have gone through something similar. However, whatever she had done, she had never shown up as the Emperor’s long-lost bastard child. Rieren had been to the capital. She’d had a hand in its destruction and the end of the Elderlands as an empire. Not once had Kalvia ever been present during that debacle.
So what had happened to her? Had she been killed before she could make herself known? Had she never intended to take the throne last time, and had instead decided to fade into obscurity to survive elsehow?
Rieren supposed she could ask if she was truly curious. Something told her Kalvia wouldn’t be difficult to persuade to give up what she knew.
For now, though, she had to focus on her cultivation.
“Are you going to start off, just like that?” Kalvia asked.
Rieren had closed her eyes to begin cultivating, but she opened them to see Kalvia pulling out a bunch of paraphernalia from her storage ring. “Are you going to establish an entire camp like last time? Answer not, that was a rhetorical question. It is quite obvious that you truly intend to do just that.”
“You don’t have to sound so disgusted, you know. I’m just making myself comfortable and—”
“I doubt we have the time to spend on comfort.”
“If I can’t spend time comfortably, I am unlikely to spend any time at all.”
Rieren stared at her for just a second long enough to make her judgement about such a statement clear, then closed her eyes again to focus. She needed to pull out and purchase some resources to hasten her cultivation too, but first, she was going to discover how exactly channelling Essence here would work.
The thing about this Enlightenment Locale, unlike the previous one, was that the Essence here was heavily infused with the local Aspect, which was Divine. Rieren had no real compunctions against channelling Divine-Aspected Essence, but at the same time, she wasn’t keen on it.
Her next targeted Aspect was lightning. She would not be able to reach it in her current realm of cultivation, but once she broke through to the Exalted Realm, it would be achievable.
However, to ensure that it was available as an option, she would first need to channel a good deal of lightning-Aspected Essence. Peaks of mountains such as the one she was currently on tended to have a great deal of them. While this one held a lot of Divine-Aspected Essence, there should still be a good amount of lightning-Aspected Essence that she could channel.
Of course, if Rieren began to draw in Essence with no preparation, she would end up channeling in Divine-Aspected Essence. It was too, suffocatingly everywhere.
There was a simple way to change that, however.
Rieren went into the System Shop to look through her available purchases. A quick filter through all the plethora of items and other things she could buy eventually brought her to her goal. The Inverted Essence Smoker.
It was a good thing Rieren had enough Credits to purchase the item.
New Item!
The Inverted Essence Smoker uses Essence to light a little fire. You can configure it to draw a specific Aspect of Essence to give the flame your desired property.
Rieren took the item and placed it several paces away, almost close to the edge of the peak. It was shaped like a brazier. There were little switches on the side that could be toggled to make it draw in Essence with only a specific Aspect. Rieren turned on Divine Aspect, then switched on the Inverted Essence Smoker.
It took just a minute for embers to flare to life at the bottom of the brazier. A few moments later, proper flames started to flicker upwards. They were the same golden colour of Batcat’s hairball that Rieren had used to kill the Life Stifler.
A quick look with her Essence-fuelled eyes confirmed the item was working as described. Shimmering sun-coloured strands of Essence were being drawn into the brazier.
With a smile, Rieren headed back to her original position. Essence wasn’t limited to the rules of the natural world, but it still tended to take up some rules that reflected the physical space it occupied. One of these was the way it filled up space. Just like gases, removing a certain kind of Essence made the other nearby kinds expand and fill up the space left behind.
Which meant Rieren was now surrounded by a good deal of lightning-Aspected Essence that she could drawn in. Taking in a deep, relaxing breath, she began.