13-12. The Nature of Cleansing
For the next few weeks, Elijah struggled to ignore the call of evolution. As much as he wanted to honor his instincts – and he did – the draw of more power was a potent one. He knew that using the corrupted Branch would be a mistake. He felt it down to the core of his identity that nothing good would come of it.
But it still pulled at his mind.
At his desire for progression.
At his need to escape the excised planet and return to his home. To the grove he could no longer even sense. To the friends and family he’d left behind. To the future he’d imagined for himself.
And most of all, it targeted his hunger. His greed. The worst of it was when, only a couple of days after his return to the campsite, he found himself eagerly downing pound after pound of monster meat. It still tasted horrible. Enough that each bite came with nausea twisting through his stomach. But he couldn’t stop eating.
Not until he forced ethera through his mantle, pushing it to cleanse the taint of corruption clinging to his channels. Its presence was insidiously difficult to detect, but it had infected him nonetheless, seeping into his mind and threatening to turn him into an unthinking monster driven by the most basic of needs.
He destroyed that thin thread of corruption, but even a week later, the memory remained.
In the interim, he’d laboriously repaired his soul. The process required a combination of Blessing of the Grove, Wild Resurgence, and Nature’s Bloom, all forced through his Mantle of Authority.
To put it mildly, it was no easy feat.
More accurately, it took every ounce of Elijah’s concentration to repurpose his healing spells to mend his soul. To an outsider, he probably looked like he was meditating in the rain caused by Blessing of the Grove. But to anyone with appropriately attuned senses, he became a black hole of imploding vitality.
The amount of energy he channeled into the effort was staggering, and even the residual effects on the environment resulted in tiny flowers blooming all around him. They didn’t last long. They wilted within seconds. But the fact that they took hold at all was an encouraging point of interest.
He had no idea how to repurpose the very temporary effect, but he still latched onto it as a thread of hope amidst the desolation of the excised planet.
Meanwhile, Benedict spent his time studying the glyphs Elijah had found on the tiles surrounding the corrupted Branch. He wasn’t as adept at interpreting them as someone like Hu Shui, but he had enough experience with ritual circles that he eventually determined their purpose.
“They were originally meant to increase the ethereal density in the plaza,” Benedict revealed. “Probably as much as ten times.”
“That’s pretty dense,” Elijah said.
Benedict shrugged. “I can see some mistakes that made it less efficient.”
“Really?”
“I don’t think this civilization was as advanced as you believe,” Benedict answered. “They were further along than Earth, but not by that much. Hu Shui could probably find even more mistakes.”
To some degree, that made sense for an excised planet. After all, the timeline of their failure meant that there just wasn’t that much time to truly integrate with the system-granted powers.
But the discussion brought to mind another issue.
“Do you think they’ve conquered them yet?”
“The Primal Realms?” asked Benedict. He shrugged. “There’s no telling. Probably not, though.”
“You think they’ll fail.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“People suck. They don’t work together. They fight amongst one another, always looking for an advantage they can use to exploit their enemies,” Benedict answered without even a moment’s hesitation. “They’re more likely to go to war with each other than to work together to conquer the Primal Realms. And that’s not even considering the lack of power.”
“There are a few strong people left,” Elijah pointed out. Sadie was still back there. Hu Shui. The guilds. Oscar and his pack.
“Do you think any of them could have defeated Etkatiran?”
Elijah shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
“We barely survived. And we had you.”
Elijah massaged the back of his neck. “You understand that’s not as big of an advantage as it seems. I’ve got power, but…well, I tend to attack most problems head-on,” he admitted. “I’m sure there were ways to conquer the Labyrinth of Dead Gods that would’ve lowered the power requirements.”
“I didn’t see any.”
“Doesn’t mean they weren’t there,” Elijah said. Then, he explained what had happened in the Elemental Maelstrom. While he and Oscar had gone straight at the problem, a group of people from the League of Ancients guild had taken the time to do a bunch of side quests in Stillstone. The rewards would have given them some protection against the elemental trials. “You have to remember that these things were never meant to be attacked by individuals. Or small groups. They’re meant for armies.”
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“And you think humanity can figure out how to work together to conquer the last two?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so.”
“Hope doesn’t really affect reality.”
Elijah disagreed, though he didn’t argue. Benedict had fully embraced the path of pessimism, and it wasn’t difficult to see why. Not only was their situation largely hopeless, but he’d been shown the error of idealism when his people had turned against one another. Benediction’s fall had wounded him deeply.
“How long have we been here?” asked Elijah.
“Six months? Seven or eight? It’s difficult to tell.”
That meant there was only a year and a half – at most – left before Earth faced excisement. It seemed like such a short span.
Elijah pushed himself to his feet. “I’ll be back soon.”
With that, he left the tent, ignoring Benedict’s glare. He’d stopped complaining when Elijah left him behind, mostly because he knew it would do no good. Or at least, that was Elijah’s interpretation.
He wasted no time before shifting into the Shape of the Scourge and adopting the Guise of the Stalker. Under the blanket of stealth, he took off in a familiar direction, not stopping until he reached a shallow cave. Once there, he ducked inside.
It was barely a few feet deep, but Elijah regarded that as an advantage. Its size meant that none of the truly terrifying monsters could use it as a den. But even more than that, the close confines meant that it was perfect for his intentions.
After verifying that no smaller creatures had taken up residence within, Elijah took the time to push a nearby boulder in front of the entrance. It wouldn’t stop a determined enemy, but he hoped it would help the cave remain unnoticed. Then, he settled down in the center of the cave and closed his eyes. He retracted his Mantle of Authority until it was roughly the size of the cave. With an effort of will, he forced the ethera within the conduits of his soul to thicken. The air bubbled, and the rocky walls sizzled under the mantle’s cleansing influence.
And within a few hours, it was clean.
But that was just the first stage. Elijah took the leavings from his latest kill form his Arcane Loop, then buried the viscera beneath the black soil. Despite its color, which resembled nothing so much as fertilizer, there were no nutrients in the ground. Elijah aimed to change that, flaring his mantle and casting Blessing of the Grove. Even as rain fell from a localized cloud clinging to the ceiling only a few feet above, the discarded offal began to rot.
Not in the same way that something on Earth would decay. There were no bacteria on the excised world. But still, his powers served to mimic the cycle of life.
The rot joined the rest that Elijah had left behind the last time he’d visited.
Finally, he put a single grain of the Soil of Reclamation atop the nutrient-rich soil. Power surged, but it wasn’t just vitality. There was something else in there. Something restorative Elijah could not pinpoint.
When that faded, he planted a couple of seeds he’d taken from his Arcane Loop. They were unremarkable. Just grove fruit seeds. Using Nature’s Design, he manipulated their growth until the seeds sprouted, sending shoots up and down. A stem grew, and roots spread throughout the ground, hungrily absorbing the nutrients that came from the rotting offal.
Elijah kept his power churning through the mantle as well as his ongoing spells, and the plant responded well, reaching adulthood after only a few hours. It even grew a grove fruit, though it was small and underdeveloped.
For two days, Elijah kept at it, suffusing that small cave with enough vitality to grow an entire forest. Then, at last, he allowed his spells to lapse.
The plant wilted immediately.
Even surrounded by Elijah’s Mantle of Authority, it could not survive. Not without his direct intervention.
It was the same every single time.
No matter how much power he channeled into the cave’s atmosphere, the plants always died. And he’d been at it for weeks.
The first time, he’d reacted poorly, going on a rampage and slaughtering a nest of monsters he found in the nearby mountains. The second time wasn’t much better. But by now? He just sighed and accepted that either it was impossible or he was missing something incredibly important.
He hoped it was the latter.
Resigned, he pushed himself to his feet and returned to the tent, where he informed Benedict that he thought they should move on. For his part, the Warlock didn’t really have an opinion one way or the other. Apathetically, he just shrugged and helped Elijah pack the tent away.
An hour or two later, they were trekking across the ruined landscape.
That went on for another two more months, with them stopping to rest every few days. Along the way, they encountered more monsters and a wide variety of landscapes. The temperature even changed, going from mild and humid to arid and frigidly cold.
That lasted for a few weeks before the climate returned to what they considered normal. But that wasn’t the last time they experienced a change, and after a while, they encountered yet another huge body of water. This time, it was an enormous sea that they were forced to skirt.
All the while, the monsters were present.
And with Benedict along for the ride, Elijah couldn’t resort to traveling in stealth. So, they kept a low profile the old-fashioned way. More days than not, they ended up fighting, though.
Benedict even gained a level, which was a nearly unprecedented pace of progression for someone in the middle of the First Wall. He wasn’t happy about it, though. Instead, his apathetic approach to survival persisted, descending well into hopelessness.
For his part, Elijah tried to remain upbeat. But every time he was forced to eat monster meat, his own pessimistic outlook surged to the fore. He rejected it each time, but he could see the end of his rope fast approaching. One day, he would reach it, and he had no idea how he would react to that situation.
Would he keep going, driven forward by momentum?
Or would he succumb and simply stop trying?
Or worst of all, would he return to that corrupted Branch and take the poison pill that was a tainted evolution?
He had no answers to any of those questions.
Maybe that was a good thing.
And then, after two months of travel, everything changed when he caught sight of something that should not have existed.
“Are those people?” he asked Benedict from where they both perched atop a mountain. He pointed down into the valley. “Those look like people.”
“I…I think so.”
They were miles away, which made them look like a swarm of ants surrounding a massive monster. Yet, when Elijah used Eyes of the Eagle, he confirmed that they were, in fact, humanoid. They were still too far away to verify more, but they clearly weren’t monsters. Not like he thought of them, at least.
“What do you want to do?” Elijah asked his companion. “Follow them?”
“I…yes. Definitely yes. We should follow them,” Benedict breathed, mingled awe and relief in his voice.
Elijah felt something similar, though it was laced with fear. Because he knew just how difficult it was to survive in the abyss, he couldn’t help but wonder what lengths those people had gone to in order to do so.
Perhaps they had used that corrupted Branch, making a deal with the proverbial devil. Or maybe they had found some other way to survive.
The only way to find out was to investigate.
Because he wasn’t certain he could endure another crack in the armor of his spirit. If it was forced to endure any more damage, everything would come crashing down. And when that happened, Elijah wasn’t sure how he would react.