After Sofia’s story, Nic was in a pensive mood. Saying goodbye to Nylea he drifted back to the Saturnalia, and let Inkspur slip off his arm to go scuttling up and wrap around the Esper-fruit tree.

Nic brought out the meditation mat from his bag and sat down, legs crossed.

He drew the Scion Awakening scroll from his bag. It was a faded scroll of rough paper illustrated with flaking gold illustrations and lapis blue ink, with a massive illustration of a red heart in a trio of sunburst halos. A dense tangle of meridian lines and nodes were illustrated within the heart, tangling together through the veins and chambers. A runic seal enveloping the seven innermost nodes was catalogued.

Beneath, Nic’s eyes began to glaze over as he realized the entire thing was written in the driest, most formal language imaginable.

“Sofia? Can you give me the short version?”

“Nicolas, the ‘short version’ is that you’ll be seizing manual control over your meridians and shifting them to form a complex sealing mark within your own beating heart. Which could explode, at any moment, if you’re suicidal enough to take the ‘short version’.”

“Point.” Nic sighed and began to read. The first step was to send careful pulses of aura through the hair-thin meridians in his heart, feeling out the structure. Almost all races possessed the same seven inner nodes - called the Bloodline Gate in the scroll - but the structure of surrounding veins was entirely different between different species.

In order to map the flow he would first need to carefully feel out each vein and branch, being especially careful to find places where the meridians had been weakened.

It was slow work. The first few times Nic tried he drastically overestimated the strength required, and had to pull back as sharp pains gripped his chest. As he found the correct rhythm, he had to begin trying to sense what the pulses were telling him, like estimating how much water was inside a flask by shaking it. Small ripples as the pulse emerged on the other side of his heart meant there were impurities or weaknesses in the meridians. Larger ripples indicating a fork in the path he’d have to explore.

At first he got nowhere at all. It was frustrating, trying to sort out differences between what felt like identical pulses of energy- the best comparison was trying to hear fractional differences in two of notes of the exact same pitch and volume.

With a sigh he stood up, plucking an Esper fruit from the tree. New ones were already beginning to grow as pale white buds on the branches. He paused to look with bleary eyes over his world, but the poison jungle was still a low stubble of newborn trees. Redjaw had fallen asleep among the ruins of the ancient battlefield.

The desert he’d set aside for Sunfire was more promising- but also more ominous. Fiery red scars extended across the earth where he’d planted the shotgun shell, full of magma and fuming up with toxic sulfurs. Sunfire was eagerly tearing apart a massive rhinoceros. Massive by the world’s standards, at least.

Nic lifted the both of them into his arms and had them fill up a vial each before he set them back down, patting them on the head. They would be advancing soon too, especially if the tiny world could help them grow…

He slid back down onto the mat.

The goal of the Scion Ascension scroll was to form a seal that would collect all the traces of ancient bloodlines in his ancestry, filtering them into a single ruby crystal at the center of the seal. During his evolution, the seal would break and his heart would literally explode, unleashing the ancient bloodline at full strength for a single moment.

If done properly it would allow him to seize a greater evolution than normally possible, and resulting transformation would reform his heart without lasting harm.

If not...

Either you clawed your way up the great chain of being, or you died trying. A failure would normally only stunt your growth- but with this technique it would end your life.

So it was important he got this right. Nic bit into the fruit and felt a cool relaxation flood through his aching skull, clearing away his headache to replace it with concentration and calm. Pushing endless streams of thin aura through his body, Nic began to draw with his eyes closed, sketching out the pathways and branches as he uncovered them. The end result didn’t look too much like the diagram- but all seven nodes were where they needed to be.

Of course, he still had to clear out dozens of impurities, and worse, fortify the walls of his meridians where battle had weakened them. The ideal way to practice this skill was really to have a more experienced mentor purge his meridians for him- like he would do for Redjaw, Sunfire, and Inkspur when they were ready to advance.

By this point, Nic was coated in slimy excretions like sweat. He pulled a rag from his mystic bag to begin to wipe it away- then paused. This place had to have a bath, right? And he’d saved their princess, sooo…

Climbing to his feet, Nic began to pad through the empty temple.

Numerous rooms were empty. A library where he briefly wandered, searching the books. They were mostly histories and fairytales. A few abandoned bedrooms where the wind pushed through broken windows. Some fire had left half of them empty pits covered in ash.

But there was a bathroom.

Nic found an enormous claw-footed golden tub. Small metal arms held crystal stones above the bowl, and as he touched them, he discovered they used trace amounts of aura to make hot and cold water. Small dishes held fragrant soaps and oils.

He poured a cool, cold bath and climbed in, his skin tingling with delight at being immersed in water. Poor axolotls weren’t really made to do all the climbing, wandering, and trekking he put himself through. They were creatures made to bathe all day and blow bubbles in the water.

Nic sank down to his neck, then deeper. His gills opened and he stared up at the calm, rippling surface of the bath from below, happy and weightless.

He opened his mouth and burbled out, “Cultivation map, please.”

It snapped open and Nic sent his full well of Essence streaming into the Spirits of the Earth ability, which he’d partially unlocked before. This time, the dark node chimed and flashed as it fully opened, becoming a well of bright light among the rivers of golden essence that flowed through his body like a starmap.

He breathed deeply beneath the water, thinking slowly.

After this he intended to unlock his Secondary Slot for Adhesive Touch and develop it into Mire Caller. The only reason he’d waited so long was that the skill was useless in the desert. Once he had the skill, he’d have an easier time binding enemies to pull out their Shards whole and intact, so the investment would pay for itself in time.

And then? The responsible answer was to fight forwards to the fifty thousand Essence needed to add a Secondary Shard to his Poison Mist. That was the requirement for truly reaching E-Class in spirit as well as body.

Without that, evolution to an E-Class body would only be a half-step.

But it was tempting to follow the path of finishing his Adhesive Touch’s base enhancement line instead. Receiving another spirit vision would help him understand his abilities, especially if he waited until he fused Shards into Mire-Caller.

Cultivating was like grasping at sands. Something always slipped through.

Nic’s eyes flickered open for a moment, and he froze. A tiny creature was sitting on the crystal that produced the bathwater. It had a roughly human shape but at the size of a single finger, with long wings of blue energy that extended from its back. Featherlike protrusions replaced hair, and her ‘skin’ was made of rippling energy like water.

Nic straightened up at once.

“Sofia?”

“Relax, Nicolas. It’s a sylph. They’re tiny forms of elemental. Or rather, elementals are created when massive numbers of sylphs flock together for a common cause. They’re everywhere, but only those with a certain spiritual sight can see them.”

“Oh.” Nic mumbled. The bath was making him sleepy, and honestly, he’d spent enough time running around naked that he didn’t care about someone watching him bathe.

Well. Maybe he’d care a little if it was Nylea.

“So it’s been there the whole time?” He asked. On the tap, the little sylph tilted her head this way and that, studying him. She’d probably never seen an axolotl before.

“There, and many more places. They appear wherever the Essence is purely concentrated towards one element. Clear rivers. Deep caverns. Wherever the elements stand undisturbed in their glory, sylphs congregate, filling the places where humans don’t tread. When they’re threatened, they form warbands and raise what you think of as elementals to serve as puppets.”

“This one probably arose from the water crystal. They don’t appear in cities often, but they do sometimes form from simple elemental devices.”

Nic leaned forward, bathwater pushing around his chest like he was a leviathan appearing from the deep. He reached out his hand and the sylph slowly stepped into his palm. “So… does she make the tap work, or does the tap make her?”

“Both. The relationship is symbiotic. But she probably formed long before the water crystal was harvested, when it was an unpolished stone at the basin of a lake or in a river.”

“Interesting. So if I gather sylphs, and use materials from places with strong elements…”

“You’re on the right track. Your enchantments would be strengthened by their presence. Potentially you could even evoke elementals instead of your usual echoes of the dead.”

Just another ball to juggle in the great show of cultivation.

He let the sylph run up and down his body for a while, dancing along his skin. She felt like a raindrop landing on him with each step. Eventually she tired and dissolved into mist, streaming back into the water crystal.

Nic slowly sank back under the water and closed his eyes, drifting off to sleep…

---

When Nic awoke and padded back to the temple’s main room, the sun was already shining. Thin streams of dawn illuminated the central chamber from high ruined windows. There was a storm over the Saturnalia, a ring of dark clouds that cracked and scarred with lightning. Nylea was already there, her fingers dipped into the sea, watching with fascination.

“Newt?” She turned towards him. “Come look.”

The tree was covered in ice-blue blossoms. The teardrop jewel had sprouted into azure vines and enormous flowers, each one bristling at its center with pure white pistils that filled the air with sweet pollen. Enormous golden beetles prowled the lower reaches, killing off parasites as they came to feast on the godly nectar. At the base, the roots mingled with a city of molten bismuth, rising into block stone formations covered in spirals of opal-metal rainbows.

Within the caves and valleys of the bismuth outcroppings lived small, pink creatures. Newt-folk like Nic, who bathed in the pools formed by dew dripping from the upper reaches, who fought with the beetles to harvest their meat and shells- and the bravest of them would climb all the way up to cultivate in the nectar pools of the flowers, experiencing nirvana as they submerged themselves into the cleansing power of the dew.

And that was just one of the things that had grown from Nic’s efforts.