I had to explain to Rik that I needed a few minutes to assign my ‘evolution points’ or risk popping like a grape. “But you are my p… team member,” he asked petulantly, “Shouldn’t I be assigning how your points are spent?”

Mae took over at that point and said, “Ahh, beloved master, that is why Shiana is such a special pet, the rest of us already have paths of advancement assigned to us, but unlocking them takes meditation time. It’s why we can offer such special bonuses to you, or didn’t you notice that you just tore through much more dangerous monsters than a team our size should be capable of subduing?”

Rik nodded, “Oh, right. That totally makes sense. I mean, my class is totally beyond badass, I guess I would be unbelievably OP if I didn’t have both a gold sink for gear and a time sink for advancement. Yeah, if you guys need to fill advancement timers, go for it. I will go ahead and keep watch. How long will this take?” I pretended not to notice Cassie rolling her eyes at Mae massaging Rik’s ego.

I mean, yeah, the zombie things were dangerous, but when you think of mini-bosses, you think of things that take at least half an hour of beat down to defeat. How was the power of a mini-boss determined? And was it a special classification, or just a term used when a monster was a little tougher than it should be?

“I shouldn’t take more than half an hour, I hope. Unless you want to play a minigame like cooking?” I asked him, joking. I guess my joke didn’t go over well, because he held up both hands, palms out. “Hell no!” he exclaimed, “No, take your time. I’d rather not accidentally cripple our team.

Mae smirked a little and then added, “I too would like to take a moment for advancement meditation, I should not take much more time than the kobold.” Rik nodded, looking at Cassie, “Do you need an advancement timer too?” He asked, “This is another one of those things the beta players have kept quiet on, I guess, and I am still trying to get used to the way pet classes work. Still a little staggered over our power, though.”

Cassie shook her head while I took my favorite meditation tripod stance, and watched Mae sit down cross-legged next to a wall. Her tails really didn’t lend her any support, so it wasn’t really a surprise that she could sit down comfortably human-style with her tails fluffed out simply behind her. “You should not be surprised.” She said quietly, “It is considered an elite class, and as you mentioned if we had umm.. grinded? Where you met me we’d probably already be past this level. The first five levels are generally quite quickly achieved for everyone and usually take less than a year even for crafters. That’s why they are called the novice levels. I would be very surprised if we don’t walk out of here today with at least level 7, considering how well we are working together.”

I really wanted this conversation to continue, but I didn’t want to risk hurting myself, so I started to dive into my soul space, without speeding things up by zoning first. Mnemosyne had mentioned that quintessence costs would become more expensive as we got more powerful and that there were ways to enhance myself without actually spending the energy on evolutions, so perhaps that could speed up my advancement. I also wanted to know what animation mana did.

I noticed that Mnemosyne was speaking quietly, half-smiling, as I approached through my field. Oddly, my little landscape was slightly larger than it was before, and slightly lower in my soulspace, almost cupped in the bottom of the orb while my center floated above it more centrally. More of my memory of the park filled it, and the stream was longer. The soulspace itself seemed slightly more spacious, and the now-clear orb of my center glowed and looked a lot like a plasma lamp, sparkly outer rim with brilliant quintessence chains pulsing around a misty, glowing middle. Unlike a plasma lamp, however, several of those chains extended past the edges in a much thinner, barely visible form to meet my skill blobs.

“Is the expansion normal?” I asked Mnemosyne, assuming she was using her newfound communications, and trying not to eavesdrop.

She nodded, “Yes, it’s your soulspace, it grows with you. Being in this dungeon has finally cleared out the last of your free taint, and minor channels to your meridians are now available. To use them, however, we are going to have to strengthen and reinforce your actual body, or else it will not survive using chi directly.”

I started looking through my possible evolutions. The Beefy, Frosty, and Tempus Fugit evolutions were still available, as were the ones that could assist Mnemosyne, but several new ones had opened up. “Why did the text on these change?” I asked.

Mnemosyne looked pleased that I had asked, “I have had a chance to get to know the terminology better, and have been talking to another sprite and comparing notes, and finding the limitations. The soul evolutions have obvious downsides that we have already written into them, but it turns out that the body evolutions also have hidden understandings that were not obvious when we first looked at them. The downsides to wasting your points on evolutions for me are obvious, in that you don’t get anything personally for them.”

She brushed each of the initial evolutions. “The two affinity evolutions, Frosty and Tempus Fugit, both increase your potential for these types of affinity, but they are similar to sorcerer paths, in that they will lower your ability to handle other sorts of affinities. The Frosty path, in particular, is already strongly aligned and will give you huge bonuses to ice affinity, but it strongly blocks the other core elemental affinities, and almost completely blocks its opposing type.”

I nodded, specialist paths. Definitely a road to power, but I didn’t know this world well enough to want to specialize yet. I am glad I had not chosen them earlier. “So what about Beefy?” I asked.

“Well,” Mnemosyne continued, “Unlocking it would also unlock a huge number of potential kobold biological advantages. Better natural weapons, better communications skills with other kobolds, maturation and breeding as a kobold, tougher skin and speed, until eventually, you can unlock greater or dire kobold, much larger and more dangerous species that are in the lands not explored by adventurers yet. Those evolutions can definitely put you on par with some of the most powerful adventuring groups, a monster to truly survive and be feared among its kind.”

I nodded, sounded like a good way to be more powerful and survive. “And?”

“And it blocks off more subtle evolutionary routes. Most monster species have a huge number of bloodlines they can potentially ascend to, especially the sentient monsters. I don’t know what they are yet, for you, but goblins, for example, are a blending of bloodlines including human, orcish, and demonic. Beefy locks you into a permanent kobold bloodline. Your offspring will be kobolds, and even if you get transmogrified you will still be kobold, just in a different shape. Most of the beast bloodlines also lock you permanently at the foundation stage, but for some beast bloodlines that stage can create creatures that are close to immortal in their final stage.”

That was one hell of a catch. I needed to become more powerful, but if there was a chance of becoming more human down the line, I needed to hold off. “So how do I unlock more evolutions or more bloodlines?”

“Well, according to an acquaintance of mine, if you start building your foundation more, more bloodlines should unlock. If you can hold off until the body stage, you might be able to find a non-monster bloodline. According to her, one of the legends from your world involved a species of monkey that cultivated until he had reached human bloodlines and then moved on from there. According to the legends, he never unlocked transformative magics, but that might have been because of where he was. He was extremely close to human, but he was called the Monkey King, or Sun Wukong.

I had seen a movie about a guy named the Monkey King. A very strong Wuxia immortal, and I knew that his legends threaded throughout xianxia literature. If he was an example of what you could do by waiting to unlock bloodlines, and the transformative magic was able to change me back to human eventually, I would take what I could get.

Call me selfish, but someday I wanted a wife, and a family, with a human woman. If I was stuck with a few kobold-like features, maybe I could find a girl who would look past that. I also needed to find how I had gotten shipped here and stop it.

I looked through my possible options. My channels were clean but tiny and were not prepared for sending quintessence into, but the rest of my body had potential. I was not a doctor, so I applied logic to the various possibilities.

If I started by feeding quintessence to my muscles, they would become very strong. Like Tempus Fugit mentioned, however, that strength could become a liability, as they could rip themselves off my bones, shatter my own skeleton, or drain enough oxygen to kill my other organs.

My heart and lungs had a similar problem. Sure, my heart could draw more oxygen, and my lungs could produce more, but would my blood be able to carry it? Would my heart be strong enough to crank up my blood pressure and blow out my veins if I got excited? What about my other organs? It looked like each meridian that was not at a limb corresponded to a group of organs, so the one in my head was the brain and spine, the one in my chest my heart and lungs, the one in my lower body was my digestion, glands, and… other organs. Before I activate each meridian, I needed to use quintessence to ‘prime’ each spot and make them strong enough to accept the flows.

In addition, I could feed quintessence into my skin, overall into my muscles, into my bones, or my nervous system. With a little concentration, I could actually feel how each of the systems worked… clearing out the taint also cleared out a sort of fog, and from within my soulspace, each part of my body became clear.

The choice was actually reasonably clear. I needed to be stronger before I could start strengthening my skin or trying to enhance my nervous system, and make sure I could carry enough oxygen to handle the workload. That meant blood. Blood was produced by bones, and that was the foundation upon which most other systems seemed to rest. It wasn’t very medico of me, but it felt like bones were the right choice.

“Mnemosyne, I am going to set about enhancing and imbuing my skeleton first. Can you think of any problems?”

She shook her head, “No, but I imagine your bone density might increase, the more quintessence you permanently assign, which could slow you down or make you heavier.”

I nodded and started to add quintessence to my skeleton. It quickly spread throughout my body and didn’t seem to have much effect at first. Then it began to hurt. It started hurting a lot. It threw me out of my soul space, and I realized I was lying on the floor, hissing and writhing in pain, wishing desperately I had just set aside the quintessence for that heal push rather than trying to enhance myself.

Cassie started walking stepping towards me and Mae was suddenly in her way. “Don’t,” she said simply, holding out her arms to either side to stop the paladin. “Don’t do that. He is enhancing his skeleton. If you heal him, you are just going to make it last longer, and hurt him more, maybe permanently. Right now his skeleton is growing stronger, but to do that it has to replace the old one. If you heal him, he will have to do it all over again, and if he runs out of energy it might do permanent damage to him. You can hold his hand, but don’t use any of your healing magic.”

How the hell did she know so much? Next time, I vowed to consult her before I took the next step, as she seemed to be far more of an expert on it than I am. I cursed my own arrogance, I simply was not used to asking for help. She had seemed to know what a cultivator was, and I had let my distrust toss away a potential resource like an idiot. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to concentrate.

The pain was becoming harder to bear, and I clenched my teeth down. If I started screaming, that could alert more of the dungeon monsters. Maybe the dungeon knew where we were, but I was betting that the monsters did not. The last thing we needed was more zombies coming to investigate while I was helpless and the rest of the team distracted.

I started using the techniques I had learned to try and step outside of the pain. It helped a lot, but not entirely. It felt like my entire body was a forest fire, the trees crackling and bursting and then searing down into ash in the flames, and it became harder to breathe, but not impossible. I concentrated on the image of the forest fire, rather than just wallowing in the pain, and could see it in my mind’s eye all through my body.

The bones, and trees, getting consumed by fire. Okay, not exactly fire, acid? But melting, melting into ash with each build of pain. Then, springing from the ashes, at the base of each tree, a green sapling, growing in the refuse of the old tree, fed and nurtured from the nutrients of the old, but more powerful and magical than its parent. Each tree was growing quickly and spreading its leaves, sending nutrients through its branches and into the deep, newly-grown root network beneath each tree.

I could feel it working its way through my body, as if I were the soil, each root a vein, more powerful, stronger, more capable blood springing along each fresh growth as the trees themselves grew to fill my body. Yes, it was symbolic, but the new, stronger trunks meshed together and created a far stronger framework for the rest of my body.

Eventually, the pain faded, and I reopened my eyes. The cessation of pain left me feeling… amazing. Weakened, a little, but I could feel my new bloodstream quietly replacing my old blood cells with new vitality, making my nerves tingle and filling my muscles and even my mind with sharper focus. Even my breathing felt easier, each lungful of air charging my body until I had to slow down my breathing to avoid hyperventilating. I felt ten feet tall, despite not having changed in size from the pathetic two and a half I had been before.

Both Cassie and Mae were holding my hands, and Mae was smiling at me, without smirking or looking particularly sarcastic for a change. I tried to wrap my head around the beautiful fox girl not looking like she was waiting for me to make a fool of myself, when Rik piped up, “Dude.”

“Dude?” I questioned him back, trying to put a lot more meaning into the single syllable than it could hold.

“Dude!” he exclaimed, grinning as he tapped his foot on the ground.

“Dude,” I said slowly, nodding to him in understanding.

Rik laughed, “Dude!” and then said, “You were like that one chick. I expected your head to start spinning around and for you to start spitting out pea soup or something. What the hell did you do?”

I smiled at Mae and Cassie and gently extricated my hands. My left hand hurt a bit more than my right, Cassie was a very strong, and apparently very worried girl. “I evolved my system. Umm... I started with my skeleton, so I could take more damage and stuff. I was going to try and learn how not to lose experience from the sacrifice heal, but Cassie’s new heal is much better, so I was going to try and make myself more of a combat asset. It worked, but man, it hurt.”

Rik nodded, and then said with his usual sensitivity, “It must suck to be a recode and to feel full pain. I mean, I have mine set to maximum to boost my rewards, but Cali law maxes it out at 50%, and Antowyn is still running at only 30% maximum because of bad reactions from some of the alpha testers. I know some of the other VR worlds run at 50%, but I bet getting disemboweled or eaten hurts a lot more than like, boxing, where it runs at the full fifty. I can’t even imagine what it would feel like to grow a whole new bone system.”

“It hurts,” I said simply, and started staggering to my feet. I did feel a little bit heavier and dug into my pack for some water and some of those nasty rations, as well as a piece of cooked fish from yesterday. “I am having second thoughts about spending the night here. I think that, if we cannot finish this place today, we should exit tonight and come back stronger tomorrow. Even if it resets everything, the idea of those head things crawling around us while we sleep is just kinda horrifying.”

Rik nodded, “Yeah, I mean, usually it doesn’t take more than a few hours to finish a dungeon in other worlds, but with the time compression I bet this one is way, way bigger. Older VR's didn’t want to let people raid for too long, but Antowyn Online requires a coolset and oxygen feed. I still gotta break for food and stuff, but as long as I get enough to eat and pass the bioscans Realsleep lets me overnight it for a week, take an hour break, and then play for another week before I have to get to school and social training. As long as I keep my study up to date and work out enough during breaks, I can keep up a serious play schedule for the next umm…” he seemed to be doing the math in his head.

I was looking at him in complete bafflement, “Time compression? And what’s Antowyn?”

Cassie piped up, “We are in Antowyn. I guess however you got the Rhydian Language didn’t cover some of the basics. We are in the Land of Rhydia, just south of the capital city of Sindaenaway. Antowyn is the name of the lands that have been explored or are known. The whole world is called Alandia. To the west is the Sandobal mountains, where I am from, and past that is Pelee. I know that there are supposed to be more dwarves to the East, in the Ironheart Mountains, but I haven’t met them. Up north there’s a lot of Rhydia till you get to the great sea, and to the east is the Talassan Sea or the Winnowrill, where the Trogs… I mean, the Winnowrill elves live. Farther than that is Goblin Valley, where most of the humanoid monsters live, and then past that is the Onyxian Empire, the less said about them, the better.”

Mae added, “Far to the south is Mentheen and Mathoria, but it’s a very long and dangerous journey, even though it’s technically all within Rhydia. There are caravans, but they must be well-armed and ready for a fight at any time because the Humanoids that didn’t go to Goblin Valley still live there and still do what they do best, murder and rob the civilized races.” She looked apologetic for a moment. “Although I have never seen any kobolds outside of the Winnowrill. The southern plains are really too open and dry for them, I think, unless they are underground and no one notices it.”

Neither Mae nor Cassie had mentioned anything about compression, almost like they never even heard it. It was kind of weird because it was like they had spaced while he was talking about the time frame and the ‘real world’. I was pretty sure that Cassie had legitimately spaced it, but Mae was tricky… her vacant expression happened a few moments later than Cassie’s, and her ears flicked occasionally while he was talking. I was going to have to keep an eye on her, even if I had to trust her about cultivator information.

I was able to hold my balance well now, and we all started to get ready to fight in the next room. I took a glance at my character sheet, noting a few changes that I had been going through too much pain to notice before. I noted the fact that if I wanted to keep track of what I was doing as a cultivator, whatever that was, I was going to have to add a new section.

Brantley Gallagher Winterborne

Ice Kobold

Body size: Tiny

Body: Fair

Health: 100%

Evolution: 12%

Mana: 100%

Mind: Good

Fatigue: 100%

Reflexes: Extreme

Unenhanced Skill Groups

Logic: apprentice great

Mathematics: apprentice good

Acrobatics: novice good

Physical Fitness: novice fair

Willpower: journeyman mediocre

Piloting: apprentice fair

Socializing: apprentice mediocre

Security: apprentice mediocre

Metalworking: novice good

Spellcrafting: novice mediocre

Enhanced Skill Groups

Survival: expert fair

Martial arts: journeyman fair

Ranged combat: adept superb

Improvised Fabrication: journeyman poor

Essence Manipulation: journeyman fair

Stealth: journeyman poor

Innate

Ice Kobold

Unique soul

Kobolds innately gain trapmaking and scrounging at apprentice level, minor natural weapons, can swim at a trotting speed, darkvision, and minor regeneration.

Ice Kobolds in particular gain 75% cold resistance and 150% cold affinity.

All Kobolds are considered tiny creatures, difficult to target for larger creatures, but are much weaker and less resistant to damage.

Your unusual origins give you a unique soul for your species.

You gain combat meditation which includes mental time dilation, fear resistance, pain resistance, and the ability to access your soul space for mana manipulation and improvised spell creation.

Unfortunately, your special soul also gives you a minor penalty to social skills.

Evolutions

Silver Cord

Sprite Information Link

Gifts and Traits

Draconic Language

Rhydian Language

Quintessence

Aura Domain

Enhanced Verbs

[Observe] great

[Push] poor

Aspects

Quintessence

Temporal

Frost

Animation

We adjusted our armor and got ready to move out.