Time Since Reckless Self-Endangerment: 3 Days 14 Hours

Goal: Kill 'Baby Boots'

Nic slept through the night on a bed of palm leaves, finally feeling something he hadn’t in a long time. The sense of home. It was a good feeling.

He began his day by training with aura. Back in City Layer d23, he’d learned the basics. How to isolate, control, and rotate his cultivation base. How to form tiny threads of Essence into a continuous circulation.

What Sofia wanted him to do was on a whole different level.

He slowly generated ‘pulses’ of Essence that swept out from his nodes, slowly travelling through his body. ‘Slowly’ was the key here. He had to control the pulses carefully, using them to sweep his body for hidden clusters of toxins.

And he found plenty.

Dark, squiggling blobs of poisoned Essence lurked everywhere. Every wound, every scratch, every battle he’d barely scraped through had left imperfections in his Essence. There was a huge cluster of impurities where the Jailer had impaled him, and his regrown limbs were heavy with black spots.

As for his organs they had suffered from his eating habits: devouring medicinal fruits and other monsters had filled them with dark imperfections.

Wrapping his aura around a cluster of black spots, Nic began to push. Slowly, making sure not to damage his meridians, he forced the toxic Essence out until it reached his skin. This was the painful part. The impure Essence burned like a brand on his skin as he forced it out, hissing steam and black droplets of filth welling up on the surface of his skin.

By the end of an hour there was a pool of black scum surrounding him. By the end of two he was cold, sweaty, and shaking from the effort.

But it was working. With each toxic cluster he pushed out, the rest of his Essence began to flow more freely, obeying his commands with ease. Rather than rough and turbulent the flow of Essence through his meridians was cold and clear and swift.

What worried him were the impurities he couldn’t purge. While most of them lingered in place like tumors, others behaved more like parasitic worms. As he swept his body with pulses they would briefly surface and then wriggle away, hiding themselves again. The few times he’d tried to seize one with his aura it had either squirmed free of his grasp or thrashed so violently he was forced to let it go before it damaged his cultivation base.

“Sofia? Are these… alive?”

“Not quite Nic. Parasitic impurities have a basic sense of self-preservation, but they’re closer to spirits than organisms. They come from consuming cursed sources of energy. Monsters who died with great resentment in their hearts are one source. That peach pit is another.” She explained patiently. “Removing them really isn’t possible at your current level, but there are treasures that can purge impurities.”

“Hopefully they make the process a bit less painful.” Nic groaned, staring down at the wide pool of foul-smelling dark filth that surrounded him. Even the centipede was avoiding the poisonous spill, and that little bastard ate anything and everything.

Already, the small yellow crabs that lurked at the oasis’ edge had learned to be very, very afraid of anything with more than eight legs.

Sliding into the water, Nic swam until the filth had run clean from his skin. In the world beneath the waters he was graceful and weightless in a way the surface world couldn’t match, and it made it easy to forget his worries. Surfacing and climbing onto the slick stones of a ruined building, he asked, “Alright. What’s next Sofia?”

“Aura lanterns. These are the most basic techniques you can use without the System, but they’ll train you in the basics of controlling aura outside the body. The goal is simply to shape your aura into light, release it beyond your body, and hold it in place. Forming a definite shape is a plus, but for now you should simply focus on maintaining the effect.” Sofia seemed happy today. Maybe it was because Nic was finally seeking her guidance, but maybe it was just the mood of this pleasant oasis infecting her.

Nic slowly reached up and touched the spears of crystal that ran down the left side of his face. The infection hadn’t grown at all, although he’d eaten another Esper fruit this morning to make sure. If anything it was almost useful; his sense of Sofia had expanded into emotions as well as words.

Brushing away his worries, Nic got down to business.

For the next hour luminous mists covered his body, floating around him like he was a mountain covered in clouds of light. Controlling the aura became magnitudes harder once it left his body, and shaping it into light was already one of the more advanced uses Nic had ever done.

It was rapidly becoming clear why the old turtle bookseller had put such emphasis on System-recognized techniques. Those were like pouring aura into a mold; the System provided the shape of the effect so long as he could provide the aura to fuel it.

This was like-

Like-

Nic wasn’t very good with analogies. He was caught up in the breathing, in feeling his lungs slowly inhale and exhale to the rhythm of his cultivation base turning over. So long as he kept the pace the rest would follow.

By the end of the hour he felt like a proper sage. The glowing mist of aura circled him slowly, and he was able to reach out and shape it with his hands, making a ball that looked like a strange and indistinct moon.

“That does not count.” Sofia insisted. “You’re supposed to shape it with your mind. And how are you even doing that?”

Nic stuck out his tongue. “Let’s see my cultivation map.”

Essence 5,000 / 5,000

+ 12.97 per Minute

(2.162 Base)

500% Local Modifier

+ Devoured an F-Class enemy (200%)

+ Consumed a G-Class treasure (100%)

+ Rested in toxic environment (100%)

Cultivation Base (Unranked)

V Physical Strength (Locked)

III Mental Acuity (52/4,000)*

I Spiritual Clarity (94/1,000)*

Regeneration (1,614/10,000)

He was considering ways to make his little den ‘toxic’ enough to trigger the bonus, but in the meantime, the snow-white fruits from Lavhin’s laboratory were enough to count as G-Class treasures. The hours of pushing impurities from his body had actually raised his base rate slightly, and that was more than enough of a reward for Nic to pump a fist in triumph.

His Essence was full, and he knew what he wanted.

Poison Mist Shard (F)

Creates and controls poisonous mist from Aura. Excellent attacking Shard, capable of piercing many defenses and inflicting ongoing damage.

II Increase Toxicity (257/7,000)

Add Aura Efficiency (0/5,000)

Secondary Slot (0/50,000)

Poison Devouring (8,793/10,000)

Mist Armor (0/50,000)

With a grin he pushed energy into the nodes located in his throat, feeding the Poison Mist shard. With a chime and a resonation that flowed through his entire body the Poison Devouring node opened fully. It felt like something was swelling within him, breaking past previous limits. As the nodes drank in his Essence they became like dark, swirling whirlpools, hungry and powerful.

He spat a ball of poison and watched it linger in the air for nearly a minute before dissolving.

But even then, he had over 3,000 Essence left to work with.

Adhesive Touch (G)

Creates adhesive threads of pure Aura. A low-quality shard of marginal utility, but with clever hidden uses suited to a dexterous combatant.

Base Enhancement (792/1,000)

Secondary Slot (0/10,000)

Permanency (0/10,000)

Adhesive Touch received a small blessing of Essence to finish off its Base Enhancement. He was considering tunneling towards the Secondary Slot as his next goal, but the truth was, his heart was already settled on fusing it with the Drowning Shard to create Mire-Caller.

A skill that would be almost completely useless here in the desert.

Totemic Petroglyphs (F)

Creates tools of bone, rock, and leather that contain the spirits of the fallen, calling them to your aid. A high-quality magical shard.

III Base Enhancement (2,130/2,500)

I Add Essence Efficiency (0/2,000)*

Additional Secondary Slot (0/50,000)

Summoning Limit (0/50,000)

Spirits of the Earth (0/10,000)

Totemic, again, was near evolution. While he’d been busy pushing his Essence towards Poison Devouring his other Shards had naturally progressed. Pouring his spare Essence into Base Enhancement for both, he spilled over into the next tier twice, a pleasant series of echoes running through his body as the nodes expanded and filled with aura.

In fact, he was barely three minutes away from being able to buy the fifth and final level of Totemic.

Which naturally meant those three minutes felt like three hours. He twitched and fidgeted as he tried to meditate, constantly snapping open the cultivation map to check until finally-

Finally-

He was ready. He pushed three thousand into the nodes at once, the rush of power almost painful as his meridians struggled to contain his excitement. The nodes surrounding the Shard were polished now, open to their full extent and acting as miniature lakes in the series of rivers that brought his Essence flowing throughout his body. Golden power accumulated within, ready to be used.

As he revelled in having finally completed one of his Shard abilities, a notification from the System swept into Nic’s mind.

And everything went dark.

Mastery Achieved

Initializing…

---

The scavenger had no name. None of its people had names.

Names were the privilege of the dead, who owned this land. Their skulls gave the scavengers caves to hide in when the shadows of predators swept through the skies above. The smallest of their fangs became swords, spears, the weapons by which the scavengers protected themselves. When the scavengers managed to crack open a vertebra or a femur after days of hard work, the marrow within fed them.

Everything they had came from the dead, who had left their massive bones to grow pale and beautiful in the sun of this forsaken land. Nobody knew where they had come from. Nobody understood what could have killed such magnificent creatures.

But in exchange for all they gave the scavengers, the scavengers gave them names.

There was the Shadow-of-Teeth-Who-Rules-This-Land, the greatest and oldest of them. There was Fingers-of-the-Midday-Sun, whose grasping hand reached for the deathly glare of the sun in the sky.

Glorious-Treachery-the-Dangerous-One, whose reclining and half-buried ribs concealed quicksands.

Seer-of-Aches-in-the-Wind, the one whose dorsal fin sung when a storm approached.

Feast-in-Pale-Coffers, who fed the tribe for years before their bones finally ran dry.

All these were good and glorious gods. But the Scavenger knew another. As his people hunted for bone-mites and marrow-suckers, thrashing the sand with their clubs to make the buried creatures surface, he slipped away.

Down into a hidden path, through dark caves that shielded his back from the sun.

Down to where his god lay hidden within the earth.

It was small and curled. The lack of sun had made its bones grow dark and dull instead of pale and gleaming like the rest. It was a god, yes, but a child-god. Weak. Not able to smite him for his blasphemy.

For he refused to name it. It would never have one, just as he would never show another living being where the bones hid. It would only be...

“Mine.”

Mine. Mine. Mine. His voice echoed through the cave.

And something sparked. Something burned in the empty eyesockets.

The scavenger shrank back as pale fire covered the bones, becoming flesh. Becoming the ghost of the terrible child-god with long teeth and wings that unfurled to fill the cave. With scales like armor. With claws like swords.

He shrank back in horror, but the god-child only bent its scaly neck to him in a bow.

“Yes.” It whispered. “I am your god. Yours alone.”