The Primeval Era

It rose from where they lay tangled together, a column of sacred fire that climbed toward clouds that were already beginning to respond. The temperatures were scorching, heat that should have reduced flesh to ash but somehow didn’t!

The feel was sacred and ancient, belonging to processes that predated the current age of the Lands of Stone.

Inside that pillar, Serala felt a tinge of pain.

Then she felt something she couldn’t explain.

Her body was changing. Every part of her, from bones to blood to the cultivation channels that had been refined across nineteen summers of dedicated practice, was being rewritten by flames that seemed to know exactly what they wanted to create. It felt like growing pains, like her entire existence was being stretched and expanded to accommodate something larger than it had been designed to hold.

All systems of her body grew and elevated in ways she couldn’t believe!

Her muscles burned as they became something more than muscle. Her bones ached as they became something harder than bone. Her cultivation base churned as it became something deeper than anything Vessel Completion should have permitted. She cried out as the sensations overwhelmed her capacity to process them!

Green flames shot from her mouth with the sound!

Minutes passed like this.

The pain continued. The transformation continued. The pillar of verdant fire continued climbing toward heavens that seemed to lean down in response, curious about what was being forged below. Serala lost track of time, lost track of self, lost track of everything except the feeling of becoming something she had never imagined!

Then, gradually, the pain faded.

What replaced it was stranger than the agony had been.

"..."

She... felt like she couldn’t understand her own body anymore. It felt too vibrant, too grand, too alive in ways that went beyond simple cultivation or Physique. She felt like she had been wearing clothes that were too small her entire life and had only just now been given garments that actually fit.

The flames began to disperse.

Green fire retreated from the air around them, the pillar collapsing inward as whatever process had required it finally concluded. Serala’s vision cleared as the last of the verdant light faded from her eyes, the world resolving back into shapes and colors she could recognize.

She opened her eyes to see Damian.

And her jaw dropped.

...!

He floated before her with embers of green flame still dancing across his skin, but that wasn’t what made her stare. He was twice as large as his own self, his human body seeming larger in every dimension, more muscular.

Verdant tattoos burned across his arms and chest, patterns that seemed to pulse with life independent of the flesh they decorated.

His Dross clothes were torn and barely fit him, fabric stretched to its limits across a physique that hadn’t existed moments ago. Behind him a pair of illusory flaming wings spread wide. Verdant blue!

He looked ancient!

He looked like something that had crawled out of legends about the time before the Ancestors, when beings of terrible majesty walked the Lands of Stone without fear of anything that lived or died!

He opened his eyes again at this moment and looked at Serala.

Those wing-shaped pupils, now burning with verdant blue flames rather than simple blue-gold, went wide with shock. He was staring at her with an expression that mirrored what she felt, surprise and confusion and something else she couldn’t quite name.

She blinked and wondered.

Had this happened to her too?

---

Damian looked at Serala and couldn’t process what he was seeing!

She was twice as large as she had been, her frame expanded in ways that should have been impossible. Her face was exceedingly beautiful, features that had been lovely before now refined into something approaching just exquisite. But there was a primal quality to that beauty now, something wild lurking beneath the surface of her expressions!

Her Dross clothes were torn in places, fabric that had fit her properly now strained across a body that had grown beyond its capacity to contain. Some areas were extremely suggestive, glimpses of skin that...oh!

Verdant tattoos marked her flesh as well, patterns that matched his own, running down her arms and across what he could see of her shoulders. Her white-gold wings had changed too, verdant threads woven through the radiance in spirals that pulsed with each breath she took.

She looked like a warrior empress who had stepped out of stories told around fires before writing existed.

Damian felt his own body and found similar changes throughout.

He was larger. Stronger. More present in ways that transcended simple physical expansion. Everything within him was churning and cycling at speeds that made his previous cultivation seem sluggish. At the very least twenty or fifty times faster and grander than before, Mana flowing through channels that had been widened, deepened, fundamentally rebuilt during those minutes of verdant fire.

He was shocked.

He needed to understand what had happened, needed information that could explain a transformation this profound!

So he reached out through the connections his Second Doctrine had established, asking the Mana raging within him and around him for answers.

Just what had occurred when he uttered that letter?

Exelissomai.

The Mana danced around him happily in response to his query. He could feel its emotion, something he had never experienced before. Joy and excitement!

The enthusiasm of energy that had witnessed something wonderful and wanted to share. Information began flowing into his mind, words forming from sensation, understanding crystallizing from chaos.

White words bloomed before his eyes.

|The Letter of The Primordial Tongue, Exelissomai, has been uttered.|

|The First Utterance of any Letter is a profound event with amplified effects.|

|Effects of the First Utterance have been applied to the speaker and the subject in physical contact: Serala.|

|An advanced form of Existential Advancement and Evolution has occurred.|

|Classification: Existential Evolution.|

|Previous State: Human.|

|Current State: Primeval Human.|

|All parameters of your existence have been expanded to reflect this Advancement of your Existential Lifeform.|

|Previous Lifeform Classification: Common Ash and Stone Lifeform.|

|Current Lifeform Classification: Primeval Viridis Lifeform.|

|Note: The gap between Common and Primeval classifications represents a fundamental elevation of existential potential. All cultivation speeds, physical and mental capabilities, sensory perceptions, and lifespan parameters have been enhanced accordingly.|

...!

What was this?!

Damian stared at the information hanging in the air before him.

Existential Evolution. Primeval Human. Primeval Viridis Lifeform!

The words made sense individually but combined into concepts that exceeded his understanding. He had been one thing and was now something else, something elevated, something that contained what he had been but could never be reduced to merely that.

And Serala had been caught in the transformation alongside him!