Chapter 72 : The Wind Dragon
The sword struck before the skeleton could retreat or raise a guard, and Evan had overestimated the construct's intelligence on the first exchange — a tree-controlled skeleton clearly approximated his own summons in form but fell well short in actual cognition. He had already closed inside the club's effective range; the weighted end of the weapon, which carried the actual danger, swept past empty air while the lighter portion near the grip continued its arc toward him with diminishing relevance. By then his sword had already found the eye socket.
The sword-aura discharged. The skull came apart, the green fire in the sockets guttering out, and the construct's animation died with it. The club, still falling on momentum alone, struck Evan's left shoulder without any force behind it. He let his shoulder drop with the impact, absorbed it, and brought the shoulder back up in the same motion — the club spun loose, taking the skeleton's detached hand with it, and the rest of the construct collapsed in a heap.
The tree convulsed, as though it had felt the loss directly. Its lights surged in response — desperate now, more points of light raining down onto the remaining bones scattered beneath it. Several skeletons began to stir.
Evan didn't give them the chance. He threw a Grand Disintegration into the rising lights before any of them finished standing.
The lights went out instantly. The half-risen skeletons collapsed back into the dust they had just left, dissolving before they touched ground.
The tree shuddered again, harder this time. Evan didn't bother diagnosing the damage. He extended a finger.
Yin-Chill Strike. He gave it no opening to recover — the dual attack against body and spirit hit it simultaneously, the decay trailing through both.
The tree's light spiked once more, violently, and then its branches went slack. Leaves fell in waves. The desiccated corpses bound in its limbs dropped to the ground around the trunk one after another. Within a minute the canopy had stripped itself bare, leaving only naked branches against the sky.
Evan waited before approaching, reading the absence of life inside the trunk. When he finally walked up to it, the tree was simply dead. He circled it once, sword-aura cutting it down, and salvaged what he could — most of the wood had already rotted, but the core of the trunk was solid and clearly valuable material. He collected it into his storage ring, which protested the addition with a sensation that suggested it was nearly full. He shook his head — a working storage ring at all was a privilege he hadn't earned and didn't fully understand the manufacture of, and a larger one wasn't something he could simply ask for.
……
They moved on. The wound in his side was healing as he walked, though more slowly than he would have expected — he didn't notice that his recovery rate here had quietly dropped. What he didn't know was that the faint trace of divine energy still circulating through his organs, being processed continuously by the nameless technique and stripped of what he had named information, was specifically Avna's own residual signature — the cold of death and the warmth of life merging into something closer to fundamental than either. The slower healing was the price of an exchange he didn't fully understand he was making, and the exchange was overwhelmingly in his favor.
They traveled more carefully now. A few hazards presented themselves and were avoided rather than fought. Large magical beasts were rare in this half-plane to begin with, and the ambient divine energy seemed to suppress the development of intelligence in ordinary creatures more than it amplified raw power — the opposite pattern from the Black Forest outside, where beasts grew strong without growing smart. This made avoidance considerably easier here than it had been.
A skeleton lay across the path ahead. Human, Evan registered immediately, and old — the bone surface had begun to crumble with age. The shoulder blade showed a clean diagonal cut, the ribs beneath it broken in a matching line. He could picture the stroke: a blade or axe driving down through the shoulder at an angle, continuing to the heart. A rusted greatsword lay nearby, its shape barely recognizable, consistent with something that had lain here for centuries.
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"Whatever you were in life," Evan said quietly, "good or otherwise, you've been lying here long enough. Let me at least give you that much."
He extended a hand. Earth-toned light spread from his wrist and the ground turned over on its own, drawing the bones down and settling the surface back to normal. Shuang and Small Ling watched without comment, though their expressions carried something approving.
They found two more skeletons further on, both clearly dead by violence. One had been a mage — a staff still gripped in the bone hand, in a style that placed it well over a thousand years old, consistent with the era of Charlemagne in Nicholas Andrew's memory. Evan picked it up. The staff itself, despite its age, was excellent work: red coral and rosewood, set with a single large pigeon-blood ruby. Fire element rather than dark, which didn't matter for his purposes — he kept it anyway.
A ring sat on one of the skeletal fingers. He took that too.
A quick check confirmed what he'd suspected: a storage ring, its original owner's signature long faded. Inside, a full set of alchemical equipment, a quantity of raw materials, and — remarkably — a high-grade Philosopher's Stone furnace. Gold coins. And, buried among everything else, a jade pendant that made Evan's breath catch.
A Philosopher's Stone fragment.
He kept his expression controlled, suppressed the impulse to examine it immediately, and put the staff into the ring alongside everything else. The ring went onto his finger.
……
Half an hour later, they reached the temple's base.
It wasn't large, and it had the look of something built for a specific temporary purpose rather than permanent worship, but it sat in the landscape with a kind of inevitability — surrounded by trees, glimpsed only in fragments from outside, fully visible now that they were close. Evan could see the whole half-plane from here, a perspective the climb hadn't offered.
Two statues flanked the entrance. One was a wind dragon in pale blue-green stone, magnificent in posture despite the cracks running across its surface. The other was a bear-headed humanoid figure holding a massive axe, its surface even more heavily cracked than the dragon's.
They started up the steps. One step in, Evan stopped.
The wind dragon moved.
It opened its eyes with a long cry, pale light running across its stone surface as it came alive. "Mortal. This is not a place for you. Wherever you came from — return there."
"Honored guardian," Evan said, stepping back. "I have no intention of breaching the temple itself. I only need to know — is the Spring of Youth inside?"
"You've come seeking it?" The dragon's wings flared, its gaze passing over the three of them, settling on Evan with visible distaste. "A lich. The Spring would be poison to you. You already live longer than most. And it doesn't extend life regardless — only preserves youth, for those who already have years left to spend."
"It's not for me. My friend needs it."
The dragon's eyes moved to Small Ling. "Where is this friend? — ah. This unicorn's foundation is damaged. Is this the one you mean?"
"Yes. I'm asking on her behalf. I don't need to enter the temple myself — only to bring the Spring back to her."
"Impossible. Unless you defeat me first."
"Then I'll defeat you."
The dragon made a sound that carried genuine contempt. "I'm wounded, but I can still manage a lich. Wind Blade."
A storm of pale blue-green blades erupted from around its mouth, dozens of them at once, swarming like hornets, each one carrying a thread of divine energy. Evan's instincts read the danger immediately — these could actually hurt him.
"Medusa's Shield."
He spoke the spell's name aloud — not as a verbal trigger but as an act of focusing intent through the words, a technique he had begun using instinctively, sensing that it strengthened the result even if he couldn't explain why. He had stumbled onto something that worked without understanding the mechanism behind it — something Earth's psychology would have recognized as belief shaping outcome, but his frame of reference didn't extend that far.
The shield manifested fully solid in front of him. Medusa's stone face opened its eyes, the serpents in her hair writhing and snapping. The wind blades arrived and the serpents devoured them on contact, each blade simply vanishing into a waiting mouth before it could land.
Medusa's eyes opened fully and two beams of grey-white light lanced out, finding the dragon instantly. Stone crept across its scales where the light touched, spreading outward, the color draining from its hide. Evan allowed himself a flicker of hope before the dragon roared and its own light flared, throwing off the petrification entirely.
The dragon's wings spread wide. Three columns of compressed wind gathered around it, merging and dividing until three remained, and all three screamed toward Evan simultaneously.
He watched them come and felt the problem clearly: once caught inside one of those, escape would be nearly impossible, and nothing in his repertoire directly countered concentrated wind force. The safest answer was simply to absorb the impact behind a barrier and hope it held.
He looked for another option and didn't find one in time.