CHAPTER 24

The sun shining ahead went a long way toward easing my mind as I stepped into the tree line, the twittering songs of birds competing through the air for superiority as they called to their mates from vast distances away. The underbrush here was nowhere near as dense as it was in my village, the trails and findings I might use to check for game much more in the open than they would normally be.

Tracking here is going to be easier than I’ve ever had it, my eyes wandered the trees closest to me for signs that the Dorian deer left at home, it was always easiest to find them in rutting season, but I found none.

I walked further into the trees, the distance between them growing thinner every few yards. I reached out and touched a birch curiously and found that much like the root systems at home, the roots intertwined here.

Frix, if I were to feed magic into the trees, could I use them to hunt for beasts?

I pulled out his book and found the answer waiting, You figured that out faster than the previous avatar. You don’t want to send too much magic through the trees, it’ll hurt them if it isn’t meant for them, but you can do that with my help.

I reached out and Frix sent the waves of magic through my outstretched arm and into the trees. The pulse of it came back to me as I had my eyes closed I could sense all of the life around me for a hundred yards. Some of them didn’t have magic, like birds and other small creatures. Others did. Those creatures glowed brightly against mind, oriented perfectly around me as they would be if my eyes were open.

“This is amazing!” I whispered softly to no one in particular. Opening my eyes, I walked toward the brightest glowing creature, it was a pig of sorts, bristly and with big tusks.

I opened Frix’s book again and words formed at my thoughts, Brilliant Boars are indigenous to this area, and are known to be solitary creatures typically. The find brightly glowing truffles and luminescent mushrooms and eat them, making them glow in the dark. If frightened, they have been known to give of a large flash that will confuse their predators.

Oh how interesting! Looking around, I found that the leaves here were all large, almost as big as my hand and an idea began to form in my head.

The reason I had come here was to hunt for Beast cores to put into my shuna. If this thing had one, I wondered what kind of beast core it would have, and what it could do for my weapons.

Picking up the leaves, I fanned them out in my hands and flexed my will and magic to make them sharp and dense enough to be thrown and stick, but I left the side in my fingers dulled slightly for this so I wouldn’t cut myself.

Taking a deep breath, I thought about where I wanted to throw the first leave and aimed carefully before reaching back and launching my first projectile forward toward the boar. It hit the ground just in front of its front hoof, making it squeal loudly before I could duck safely behind the tree to my left. It’s head lifted int the air and a screeching call scraped my ears as light built in its eyes.

The flash! I grimaced and threw myself behind the tree, closing my eyes but getting a rough slap from one of the roots on the ground in the shoulder for it. I wouldn’t be blind, but now my prey knew I was here.

I rolled quickly to my feet and assessed my shoulder. It was sore, but not useless.

Now that it had used it, I should’ve been able to use that to my advantage. Launching myself around the tree I had used as my shield, I found that I was alone and the boar was running off in the opposite direction.

I growled, “No you don’t!” Tearing off after the thing full tilt as I launched my leaf blades at it. Three missed and I grew frustrated, flicking my hand forward with the three I held and hoping I got lucky.

A squealing oink of a cry rang out and the sound of something falling and snapping twigs reached my ears from the other side of a bush that the boar had rushed through.

I sidled around it, between the bush and a tree that I snatched another handful of leaves off of and empowered them with my magic before I came to where the boar lay. Lame on the ground, it attempted to stand, but its back right leg was wounded—the tendon there sliced by one of my thrown leaves—and it couldn’t.

Tusks turned toward me as it oinked a threat that I couldn’t understand, then it began to screech and thrash about as it was pulled back into the bush by something.

I backed away and found that the bush wasn’t one at all—it was a moss lion.

It turned, the squealing boar under its massive paw as amber eyes watched me jealously. The leaves that were its mane rustled in a stray breeze as its nose twitched and the brown whiskers followed and sank as the teeth were bared at me.

My blood ran cool for a heartbeat as I thought of a plan, anything to keep this thing from killing me like my father had always said one might if I didn’t eat my broccoli. I’d always hated them, and then there were the turnips and carrots all that grew underground and tasted weird to me.

The roots below our feet!

As it leaned backward, eyes widening, I prayed that this would work and begged Frix to be alert, as I stomped my foot on the ground and shoved magic into the earth beneath me. The result was more explosive than I meant for it to be, the roots beneath me rising too fast to control and kicking me into the air fifteen feet, near a low-hanging branch that I was able to grab onto thankfully.

One of the upward facing roots sliced into the air in front of the lion and it danced around it to jump onto the trunk of a tree nearby, then leaped toward me with claws outstretched and mouth opened in a snarl.

I swung my legs under the branch, then over it and the movement dipped the branch lower than the lion’s flight path. It hit the branch and snapped it with its weight and the only reason I was okay was that I has shoved mana into the tree through the limb and willed it to grow a net of branches under me. It hurt landing there with the new limbs having sticks and leaves budding from them already, but I wasn’t on the ground.

The limb in my hand was a spear, but that was hardly what I was capable with at the moment. If my shuna had cutting edges… I snarled, “They won’t break!”

Calling them from my Hollow Flower, I stood on the branches under me and watched the lion moving around the tree trunk below me with clear interest in me, it’s eyes flashing intelligently before it roared.

Grass grew on the ground below it and began to wrap around the base of the tree and flow upward toward my perch. What in the Forest is that?!

I strengthened the limb with mana and speared it at the lion and it stepped aside easily.

If I waited too long the grass would reach me and I doubted that would be good. The leaves finished blooming beneath me and I belted my hand axe, plucked them from the sticks they were on and embed them with mana. Fanning them out slightly, I threw them for all I was worth at the lion and it didn’t move as I fell toward it with my shuna in my left hand.

Three of the seven leaves I had thrown hit it in the chest and it yowled as it batted at the ones it could reach. The distraction was enough for me to reach within myself and scream with everything I had in my body, mind and soul, the dull weapon in my left hand stabbing down into the lions eye with all of my weight and momentum behind it.

Blood splashed against my shoulder and cheek, but so did a massive paw, sending me backward into the tree trunk as it growled at me, teeth flashing as it opened its mouth in triumph and surged forward.

I grimaced and slapped the tree behind me before I dropped to the ground and rolled forward. Wood splintering and the wet suction sound of punctured meat made me whip around and prepare for the fight. But the branches I had called with the mana I had used had done more than I had hoped and speared it through the shoulder and stomach.

Blood, a brackish and muddy-smelling liquid leaked from both wounds and I knew it would likely be able to free itself if I was too hesitant. I pulled the reinforced branch spear from the ground and stabbed the lion once. Twice.

By the third and fourth time I was shouting incoherently as the lion expired on the branches that held it. I heard rustling behind me and stumbled to the side before turning unsteadily to find the boar was still alive and had begun to try and push itself out of the area.

I snatched the branch spear out of the tree that I had been stabbing with the lion before it and trudged closer to the boar with a grimace stuck to my face. The boar looked back in time to see me and flinch, eyes beginning to glow again but I slammed my eyes shut as I stabbed forward and down, the same squelching and resistance I had felt with my previous work meeting me.

I panted, suddenly exhausted.

Congratulations on receiving another level up! Your level, status and skill points will reflect upon all allocation. Good work! The quest giver, or I guessed that I could just call her Kalia, spoke into my mind.

Looking around blearily, I watched as the grass that the lion had called to it browned and then grew down the side of the tree to grow beneath it. The beast began to fade and leave behind the normal things that beasts left when they fled the mortal world. There were tufts of moss that would be used as ingredients, teeth and claws that were commonplace enough in weapons and jewelry. But what I hadn’t been expecting was the glowing emerald-green beast core in the center of the pile.

Beast cores were common in some beasts, but the others were a little harder. For instance, the weaker a creature was, the less likely you would find one of much value that wasn’t broken or had been consumed in the fight that killed it. For predators like the moss lion, they were a little harder to gather, but they would typically be stronger than those found in animals like mirror cats or herbivores.

I picked it up and frowned as Kalia’s voice rang out in my mind again, You have collected a beast core from a Moss Lion—main attribute dexterity. Would you like to siphon the dexterity points from this beast core? Yes / No?

I blinked at the item in front of me, my exhaustion gone. “Frix, what’s this about?”

I opened the book and saw that his tone was as uncertain as mine was, I…I don’t know. Everything we knew about the previous avatar just said that there were certain stones like the Luck Stone that you had been gifted able to bequeath status points to him. But being able to take them from beast cores is…something that might get you “nilfed” as Kalia said. Or at least the next avatar if there is a need for another.

Should I do it? I frowned at my own question, there was no reason to. I had all these levels that I could use to gain more points for now. What I needed was the beast core. Don’t worry about answering that.

“No.” I muttered and the question eased off my mind. I blinked at the core and found that there was mana within it. Strictly structured and stringently compressed, but it was there.

The question was did I add this to my blade shuna, or the axe shuna? I gathered the items the moss lion dropped and put them into my Hollow Flower before looking at the boar. It had faded and left behind slabs of meat and some of the food that it ate, which was interesting, but what made me grin the most was that it had left a beast core behind as well.

I blinked at my incredible luck and thought about my status. Sure enough, it had gone down to four.

Luck was a rough one to take a hit on. Would I lose the stat if it hit zero? I leaned down and grabbed the stone, a similar message populating, but this time this one was for Luck.

I seriously considered draining it on the spot just to be safe, but I didn’t resolving to come back and hunt again once I was stronger, or at least a little more skilled. I took some leaves and fed them some mana to make them a bit larger, then made platters out of bark and put the slabs of meat on them and wrapped them up to take back to the mess hall and see if they wanted them. The truffles and mushrooms I gathered and deposited as well, then resolved to get a bag or something to pull them out of in the future. That would be less alarming to people, right?

Frix will lead me through gathering mana? I would like to put this place back the way it was.

With Frix’s help, I was able to do just that, as well as gather some plants that I wanted for my room before I headed back toward the Academy.

**

The kitchen staff had been all too happy to accept the meat, though there was a little more todo than I had thought there might be.

I tried to just leave, but the second I’d turned around to move along, she had grabbed me, the portly elven woman with grey skin eyeing me with a scowl that I was afraid of more than fighting the moss lion, “You’re too skinny, boy. Need meat on them there bones. You stay here.”

She turned and deftly cut a loaf of bread in half lengthwise and began to pile cold cuts of meat onto it with cheese and then turned to me, eyeing me, “You allergic to muster oil?”

I didn’t know what it was, “I’m not sure, ma’am.”

She raised an eyebrow, reached to her left without looking, grabbed a jar with a yellow substance in it, then reached right and grabbed a spatula-like spreader and dipped the latter into the former. She handed the spreader to me and ordered, “Smell it.”

I did as she ordered and it smelled tangy but not bad. I swiped my finger through it and tasted it, my eyes widening as I came back for another finger swipe before she laughed, a barking cackle and took the spreader from me. She wiped it off and used it to spread a generous portion of it over the top most portion of the bread before she put that on a plate.

Then she called a stream of words that I couldn’t comprehend and someone tossed her a cutting board and a knife that she caught deftly and began to cut berries in front of her with precision

I wished that I could emulate. She added the berries to a bowl and poured a white substance into it before stirring it around a bit by shaking the bowl. She reached above her head and grabbed a small serving bowl and divvied out a small portion for me, sitting the bowl on the plate.

“You take this into the mess hall and rest while you eat.” She stared me down as if she was daring me to tell her no. “Then, in a coupe hours, you come back for mess and eat more. Key to growing and getting more muscular is to feed the body. Understand?”

I nodded at her as she she watched me, then she gave me a small smile and placed a small fork on my plate before shooing me out of the kitchen. “Go eat chow.”

I nodded again and scurried away to do as she said.

The sandwich was one of the best ones that I’d ever had in my life. The meat was delicious and savory with notes of hickory and apple spread through that only served to help the muster oil stand out and just made me drool. I finished the sandwich before I realized that I was truly ravenous and then tucked into the berries. They were so tart, but the small saucy slurry at the bottom made it sweet and almost hurt my jaw with how good it was. I finished that with a frightening pace and took the plate back up to the pile that was on at the end of the line that looked dirty.

I went back to my room after that to begin getting things set up the way I wanted, having to make trips outside to get what I needed here and there, like soil and stones. There were no planters or pots that I could find, but I could always pay a visit to the botany class and speak to the professor. The plants that needed those, I left alone and focused on things like the ivy and moss that I could grow in the room.

Their was a mushroom that glowed in the darkness that I put in the far corner of the room and willed it to spread in a swirling pattern on the floor. Ivy creeped up the wall by my bed and out the window that I had left open for Aren to hunt flies and other insects with.

Once that was done, I had choices to make. I could fight, and I could run. I was fast and getting stronger. I had to be closing in on earning more status points as opposed to spending my levels to gain them. If I worked hard, I could gain five of them and then level up and get what I wanted out of it, right?

That meant training my strength and stamina, certainly. But what about my body itself? I was still physically unimposing and that left things that I couldn’t effect out of my control, like reach and bulk.

I opened Frix’s tome and opened it, asking, “How can I fix myself, Frix?”

Your constitution is still at the minimum one point, Saemus. You could add points to it and it would allow you to grow, actually grow, a bit. At your age, children go through growth spurts all the time, so if you were to add points to it, that would be one way of cutting some of the distance between you and the older children down.

I frowned, “There’s no way for me to raise that manually?”

No. Not unless you want to start poisoning yourself. He paused in his writing. Do not start poisoning yourself!

“Why would I do that?”

You know why, you point hungry child. He didn’t say anything for a while, then he wrote, Look, it may be a good idea to do later on, but this is one of those things that you don’t want to do with only a single point in the stat. Okay?

“That makes sense.” I sighed and resolved to likely needing to spend a level or two on it anyway, which was annoying. If I grew too fast though, it could be alarming for others and draw too much attention to me. Better to do it in increments.

Closing my eyes, I took a small nap before lunch mess and then waited for my lessons later in the evening.