As Nic sat down on the meditation mat, his body was still resonating with the fading energy of his breakthrough. He brought out his Mourners Lantern and drank its accumulated energy, pushing his Mental Acuity up a step.

Doing it now might give some final advantage to his evolution, and Nic wanted every last scrap of power he could muster.

Next, he drew the energy from his Concept of Sacrifice out. Unlike the golden Essence that he drew from the world around him, this wisp of Spiritual Essence was pale white and thin as mist; stranger still it had its own will, moving without his command to enter the spiritual node at the core of his forehead.

As he broke through into the next stage of Spiritual Clarity, he reached out and let his transformation begin. Ever since he crossed the boundary of three days connected to the Node, his body had been filling with a strange, timeless strength, building up within his blood and marrow. It concentrated near his heart like a wellspring of power.

Taking out the Ur-Heart and the Tributary Bloodclay - the bloodline treasures he’d fought so hard for - he consumed them one by one. They dissolved instantly into a violent, searing strength in his gut. He reached for that strength, and an amber cocoon surrounded him.

His mind was swept towards the Bloodline Sea.

---

Nic drifted in infinite blood, surrounded by luminous spheres. Each contained a different vision of his future, a different vision of him, a different path he might take. It was like a garden of worlds, each contained a timeline.

When he’d come here with Redjaw he’d merely wanted to find the best possible evolution for his ally, the most utility and strength.

Now, when he had to choose his own path, he was swept away by the possibilities.

Nic drifted towards the nearest sphere, admiring what lay within.

It was the race he’d first considered as an evolution, the Lizardman. A brute covered in thick muscle and equally thick scales. Strong and surprisingly nimble, they were ambush hunters who lurked beneath their waters, their skin able to change colors to blend into the environment as they waited for hours in shallow swamps to surprise their prey. They had burly strength and brutal biting attacks, a tail that could strike with the force of a sledgehammer. Every one Nic had ever met was a killing machine.

But they were notoriously slow cultivators. They simply lagged behind the other races in their ability to gather Essence, and so they were considered stupid brutes.

Nic kicked through the waters.

The first golden sphere was dwarfed by another, brighter choice. When Nic looked within he saw a species of Lizardfolk he’d never encountered- an ancient, long-extinct power. It had a crocodile’s head and an even thicker, more brutish body, with golden runes carved into each scale. A single golden disk sat between the ridges of its eyebrows.

His Ur-Heart reacted slightly as he approached, singing a deep note of ancient power.

Sarradur Crocodile-Folk (Ancient Variant). E-Class // Sapient. Created from river clay to defend ancient temples, the Saradur lacks its brethren’s weakness for cultivation. Imbued with holy strength, their clumsy frames become agile and even graceful underwater, where they enjoy a powerful regenerative ability.

Nic considered for a long moment. They were powerful, especially beneath the waters where his own regenerative talents would combine to form a truly spectacular healing rate, but they were clumsy on land, and he’d have to change his entire fighting style to adapt to slow, powerful strikes.

It was possible to do.

It would just take time he wasn’t sure he had.

Swimming forward, he examined more and more of the worlds of possibility before him. There was the Dragon-Blessed Kobold, which stood out as the only winged race available to him. Normal kobolds were measly, weak creatures, but this one had real muscle on its scaly frame. It could breathe fire, its talent for cultivation was good-

The only problem was it was such a weak, strange path. Flight was tempting and so was the cultivation talent, but in the end, it was a path of growth, not immediate strength. The real reason to take it was to gain a distant thread of dragonblood and hope to someday evolve into the true thing.

Nic had no time for that.

There were races more similar to his current form. The most obvious was the True Salamandrian, a red-black and newtish creature with a mastery over flame and a regenerative talent that dwarfed his own. Nic wasn’t all that tempted. The lack of physical capabilities turned him away, and his attempts to absorb the feather’s fire-aspect had shown him a total lack of affinity for flame. Learning to use a new ability set he was clumsy with was simply not in the cards.

More interesting were the Stone-Eyed and Sage-Born variants of Newt-Folk. The former had pebbled grey skin and bright yellow eyes that almost boggled out of its head, with a patch of slimy orange across its throat. Its gaze contained a slowing hex, stealing its enemy’s ability to fight back second by second as the curse sank into their skin.

The Sage-Born focused on the race’s talent for regeneration, expanding it into the ability to control lifeforce in other creatures. The application of healing magic wasn’t too interesting to Nic, but the Sage-Born’s ability to seize control of plant life and grow tangling forests of vines from the earth very much was- the fight in the desert had showed him the power of that talent. The Recall for the Sage-Born even suggested they could learn to stop an enemy’s heart with a palm-strike.

Both had incredible talents, with Nic leaning towards the Sage-Born for its versatility.

But nearby, close enough to be a relative of the Newt-Folk cluster, another contender presented itself.

Darting Assassin Frog-Folk. E-Class // Sapient. Living in humid jungles where their skin is forever wet, these vibrant devils produce a slick and poisonous mucus that can be fatal to even touch. Beneath their long tongues they store spiny barbs they can spray out, carrying a concentrated dose of their deadly secret weapon.

It was in many ways perfect. While there was no step up in strength, the long, leaping legs of the frog made it even more agile than Nic was already. The venom-focused cultivation reinforced his existing strengths, with the mucus-covered skin and hidden darts giving him new vectors to spread his deadly poison from.

Nic struggled to find an argument against the Assassin Frog-Folk. If something else was going to take its place, it would have to do so on its own merits, not the Frog-Folk’s weaknesses.

He drifted past several totally inhuman forms. None of them interested him, because his fighting style was in part dependant on the weapons he crafted. Without hands, they’d be unable to use one of his three Shards, crippling their potential.

But still… they were tempting…

A feathered raptor with brutally powerful hindclaws and flightless wings, capable of inciting a bloodrage that grew more powerful each time it struck its enemy.

A pond-drake, slimy-skinned and flat-headed with the colors of a koi carp, fighting by shooting jets of pressurized water from its mouth.

A true salamander, surrendering hands to surround itself in a constant inferno and feed off volcanic vents deep below the surface.

He ended up drifting deeper into the Frog-Folk’s ancestry, searching. There were huge, unkillable toads with warty skins and incredible constitutions. Smaller, deep-water things with four eyes called the Ku-Ha who were masters of an art called the Deep Runes.

And deep within, a strange and tantalizing choice.

Slaa-Verdek Frog-Demon. E-Class // Demonic. Born from slimy deposits of hellish energy infused with chaos from the Beyond, Slaa-Verdek are weak but malleable, the seed of chaos in their hearts allowing them to undergo constant evolutions to adapt to their environment. Whenever they suffer a near-death encounter, they undergo transformation, shedding their current skin to take on a new form better suited to surviving that particular danger.

They were strangely beautiful, with golden-orange skin and a gracefully long-limbed form. They had arrow-shaped heads with wide, red-rimmed eyes split apart by dual black pupils, and atop the blunt slope of their heads, a night-black pattern in the shape of a devilish, grimacing mask.

True to their nature, their ability was chaotic. They’d constantly be forced to adapt to new bodies, just as their body adapted to its environment.

It was hard to say how valuable the ability would be in combat, but in terms of exploration, it would let Nic go anywhere without fear- he’d only need to take on a near-lethal dose of fire to explore a blazing cave, or expose himself to drowning to gain gills.

It spoke to Nic’s nature, his talent for surviving situations that would’ve spelled doom for anyone else.

But still, his search continued. He drifted away from the strange, malleable frogmen and towards another cluster, equally bright.

There…

There he encountered temptation.

Charmer Snake-Folk (Hybrid). E-Class // Sapient. Half-serpent and half-human, this crossbreed creature was engineered by the ancient gods of the snake-cults to serve as their emissary to the lands of the pink-skins. With all the human talent for meditation, and all the Snake-Folk’s deadly poison and mesmeric magic, the Charmer is a herald of great and wicked designs.

It was not a good fit for Nic. He had a lousy talent for meditation, and mesmeric magics sounded even less suited to his particular skills.

But from the waist up, it was human. The upper torso was covered in trailing lines of bright green scales, and the face was ridged with thorny, dull spikes extending up from the shape of the eyebrows. But it was Nic’s face, and he felt a sudden, desperate urge to take this one, to regain some part of his identity before the Lottery and the new world.

He shook it off. Kicking away, he tried to get as far from the temptation as he could-

Until, in his chest, the power of the Ur-Heart suddenly jolted through his spiritual form and tugged him off course. He was pulled towards a glowing sphere he’d almost ignored.

One that contained a terrifyingly powerful shape.