Chapter 129: The Electric Eel
"Agreed. I'll release you and return your staff either way, but you'll swear an oath to your spirits — no further attacks on us, and no leading us deliberately astray," Evan said, holding the man's gaze steady.
The shaman hesitated. "Fine. But you'll swear the same — no harm comes to me."
"Done," Evan said, and with a gesture, the cords binding the shaman dissolved into black smoke. He handed back the bone staff, and both sides swore their oaths to their respective spirits. Evan knew the vows themselves carried no real weight — he'd only offered them to set the man's mind at ease. The true safeguard sat buried in his own magic. While loosening the cords, he'd slipped a thread of his own power quietly into the shaman's body, his level so far beyond the man's that it went entirely unnoticed. It was a principle Evan had always followed — never hesitate to assume the worst of someone in your own thinking, but act, wherever possible, with the best intentions you can manage.
Xiaoshuang caught what he'd done and gave him a sideways look. "Playing the saint, are we. Everyone knows how sneaky you really are" — though she kept this strictly to a whisper in his ear. Evan ignored her.
Evan gave the word, and Jaymes helped the wounded warrior up, pouring a healing potion down his throat. A fine piece of alchemical work — within moments, the man was back on his feet, though his face still carried a scowl.
"Go back and report what's happened," the shaman told the warrior. "I'll travel with them." The man nodded and turned to leave.
Evan gave his own name and asked the shaman's in return. Amos, the man called himself. "Honored Shaman Amos," Evan said, "our clash cost you five lives, and for that, I apologize. How does your people handle the burial rites for warriors like these?"
"Our dead are given to the trees," Amos said respectfully. "We choose a great tree, open a hollow in its trunk, place the body inside, and seal it closed."
Evan nodded, gave a wave of his hand, and a great tree split open as if struck by an axe. "Something like this?"
Evan's gesture served two purposes at once — a genuine gesture of respect for their customs, useful for winning trust, and a quiet display of power besides. Gratitude flickered across Amos's face, quickly replaced by wariness. "Yes. Just like that."
They laid all five bodies to rest inside the tree, and Amos led them through a full hour of prayer rites. With Amos guiding the way, they soon reached the lake's edge — the water clear, gentle waves rolling across its surface, the water level low enough to expose broad stretches of shallow, pebble-strewn shore. By the time they arrived, dusk had already settled in. They'd set out late to begin with, covering nearly ten thousand miles in a matter of moments before fighting two hard battles besides. Evan felt no fatigue himself, but Jessica, Emma, and the students were plainly running on empty.
The rescue was urgent, certainly, but three days had already passed — one more night wouldn't change much. Evan gave the order to make camp. Tents went up along the shore, a protective array raised around the perimeter, everyone falling into their assigned tasks and finishing quickly enough.
A minor incident followed. Lucas went to fetch water from the lake and got a shock from an electric eel — fortunate that he was a mage, with far more tolerance for it than an ordinary person would have had. Even so, his whole body convulsed and he fell into the water. Alexia spotted it and froze the eel solid on the spot with an ice spell.
They pulled Lucas out, his body still twitching, hair standing on end, taking some time to recover. Jessica, meanwhile, seized on the frozen eel like she'd struck gold. Evan glanced at it. "Ah. An electric eel."
Xiaoshuang perked up at once, flying over to circle the creature, eyes bright with interest.
"You know this creature, Professor Wang? It generates electricity but makes no sound doing it — that's worth studying. I'd call it an electric eel — fitting enough, though I don't recall it appearing in any beast compendium," Jessica said.
Understanding settled over Evan — this species evidently hadn't been catalogued in this world, or at least not across Tyrenese. "It's a kind of fish. Whether it counts as a magical beast, I couldn't say. I remember hearing about it somewhere, though I'd never seen one myself until now. Genuinely eye-opening."
"It generates electricity to attack people. How could that not make it a magical beast?" Jessica said.
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"It's not one, actually. No sigils on its skin, none anywhere inside it either. However large it grows, a Core Stabilization spell won't find a magic core in there at all," a voice cut in — Amos.
"Amos, what do the people here call this creature?" Evan asked, remembering he was a local.
"We call it the lightning-ribbon fish. It only lives in this region, especially thick in the Sacred Lake of Life — nowhere else that I've ever heard of. By every method we use to identify magical beasts, it truly isn't one. It only discharges electricity, something close to lightning, but without sound, or barely any. To catch one, we usually drive cattle or horses into the water first, let it discharge, then take it while it's spent. Seems it can only discharge two or three times a day," Amos said.
"A creature like that — students, let's go catch some electric eels," Jessica said, far from disappointed, her interest only sharpening.
Catching them proved simple enough for mages. Jessica summoned her Water Dragon Beast to churn up the lake, and the eels discharged one after another against its thick, unfeeling hide — an illusion of solidity, in truth, though anyone unaware of the deeper nature of such summons would never have known the difference. Between Jessica and her students, they caught over a dozen eels in the end.
Jessica sealed away a portion of them and laid the rest out one by one inside her tent, pulling a portable dissection table from her ring and setting to work.
She cast Clarity on herself first — a spell that sharpened focus enough to catch the smallest details, though it carried a cost. Once it wore off, depending on how long she'd used it, she'd suffer anywhere from two to six hours of dulled, drowsy exhaustion. She recorded every detail in her notebook as she worked.
She confirmed the eels genuinely lacked the sigils that usually marked a magical beast — even a magnification spell revealed nothing of the kind. It was only when she accidentally touched metal forceps to the muscle tissue that a tiny spark leapt out.
That spark set something turning in Jessica's mind — a wild thought that perhaps living bodies, human ones included, carried some current of their own, however faint. She wrote the idea down carefully.
The next morning, she still looked thoroughly worn out. Evan caught sight of her and gave a rueful look, pulling her aside privately. "Honored Jessica, we're here to rescue people, not conduct field research. If you'd like to study this properly, apply to Ortlando for funding once we're done and build yourself a laboratory out here. For now, please, set the curiosity aside and keep your mind on the rescue."
Worn out as she was, Jessica still let out a short laugh at that. "My apologies, Evan. Understood. I'll set the research aside," she said, then added under her breath, "Wasn't this your suggestion in the first place?"
"Don't listen to him," Xiaoshuang cut in, perched on Evan's head now. "I want to know why the eel can do that in the first place."
"Xiaoshuang, don't stir the pot. Should've left you behind," Evan said. Xiaoshuang puffed out her cheeks, huffed once, and ignored him after that.
Something like smoke rose in the eastern sky. Evan glanced at it, puzzled — cooking fires from Amos's village, perhaps. He didn't dwell on it, and Amos didn't seem to notice at all. They continued along the lakeshore.
"Legend says the Sacred Lake of Life belongs to a goddess," Amos said. "She's said to have opened her own divine realm upon the water. Some claim to have seen it."
Evan caught the thread at once. "How old is this legend about the Sacred Lake of Life?"
"Very old. At least a thousand years," Amos said.
"The Sacred Lake of Life — from the name alone, it should belong to some goddess of life. Does your mythology have such a figure?" Evan asked.
"Our mythology has no goddess of life, honestly. We have the nine pillar-gods — Amun-Ra, ruler of all gods and lord of the sun; Tefnut, goddess of rain; Shu, god of wind; Geb, god of earth; Nut, goddess of the sky; Osiris, god of the underworld; Nephthys, guardian of the dead; Set, god of chaos; and Isis, goddess of fertility. Each rules over their own heavenly pillar. Our legends hold that the world rests on nine such pillars, and what people see is only three of them. There's no goddess of life among them. That title seems to have come from the old legends of Xilun, across the sea in Tyrenese," Amos said.
"You mean this goddess of life is Avna?"
"Should be her. I've heard the gods of Xilun have fallen, though I couldn't say if that's true. Our gods remain — they once helped us defeat your Emperor Charlemagne," Amos said, a note of pride creeping into his voice.
"I'd heard Emperor Charlemagne's campaign across your continent was a great success — that he brought the Creator's faith to your lands," Evan said.
"That's your people's lie. Some among us worship the Creator, yes, but it's far from the dominant faith."
"Whatever the truth, it seems both sides claim the victory in their own histories. I suppose history gets written from whichever angle needs it most," Evan said.
Amos had grown heated a moment before, but at this his mood soured further. "Perhaps you're right. Might have been a battle where neither side truly won or lost. And you people — calling us beastmen. How are we beasts? Our gods take the form of beast heads on human bodies. That carries a particular meaning."
Jessica cut in at that. "So that's where the name 'beastmen' actually comes from?"
"Exactly so. We're human, through and through — but by the grace of the sun god, praise be to you, great lord of all gods, radiant sun — he gave us our dark skin," Amos said, offering the praise without hesitation.
Jessica's spirits had recovered enough by then that she launched eagerly into conversation with Amos, while Xiaoshuang and Evan carried on a quiet exchange of their own through their mental link.
Lich, do you think Avna's temple is really out here?
It should be. There's no goddess of life in this continent's own mythology, and Avna herself told me she was somewhere in the Barbarian rainforest. This could well be the place.