13-20. Drive
Elijah felt it long before he laid eyes on it.
The spire jutted from the ground, rising dozens of miles before disappearing into the darkness of the abyss. It was visible even from hundreds of miles away, glinting in the violet light cast by the tendrils of illumination slithering through the sky.
Situated in a giant crater, it was surrounded by nothing. The ground had been worn smooth and melted into black glass, and the pierced sky roiled like an angry storm. Even as Elijah approached the lip, he knew he’d found something notable, if only because of the density of the local ethera.
It was laced with just as much corruption, but even at the edge of the crater, it was thick enough that it almost felt solid. He reached out, waving his hand through the air. Ripples followed the motion, subtle and barely perceptible, even to his senses.
The corruption was so strong that even a moment’s contact frayed the branches of his soul at an accelerated rate. He estimated that it would destroy his Mantle of Authority in the space of a few hours.
Which made it perfect for what he had planned.
Elijah knew it was a bad idea.
Over the past month of traveling through the abyssal wasteland, he’d gone over it a thousand times. And even if he survived, there was a good chance that he’d end up like one of those unfortunate farmers in Dravkein. But the reality of it was that he had no choice but to play the hand he’d been dealt.
Yet, even though he recognized the dangers, he also knew that his chances of escaping the excised world of Gorveth were extremely low. Couple that with the fact that he couldn’t simply stop progressing, and his path was clear.
He just wasn’t looking forward to walking it.
It was one thing to use something like the Shackle of Penance to jumpstart his body cultivation, but it was something else altogether to plunge ahead into the densest corruption he’d ever encountered.
On the surface, it made perfect sense.
One of the key components of body cultivation was exposure to incredible physical damage. Some people swam in lava. Others used potions. Elijah had even read a guide that suggested that some people – at much higher levels of cultivation – dove headfirst into stars or black holes.
According to that same guide, successful attempts at cultivation adapted the body to those effects. For example, swimming in lava tended to make one more heat resistant. Following that line of thinking, bathing in dense corruption could give him some natural defenses against it.
Or it might kill him.
More likely, it would leave him deformed and crippled.
And yet, Elijah had reason to expect success. Over the previous months, his Mantle of Authority had been through quite a metamorphosis. Not enough to push his soul to the next tier, but it had been refined and strengthened countless times over. It wasn’t so different than lifting weights. Every time it had been damaged and rebuilt, it had come away stronger than before. Not by a lot, but when the constant abuse added up, it caused substantial improvement.
Of course, Elijah did what he could to guide it as well. He had experimented with its various functions, learning how to control the flow of ethera with ever increasing precision. The only real failure had come when he’d tried to cleanse the corruption within the people of Dravkein. Because those mutations were just their bodies’ natural reaction to exposure, rather than evidence of corruption, his efforts were largely ineffective.
But it had given him an idea that had finally bloomed to fruition when he’d laid eyes on the spire.
“Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he muttered. It was a cliché, and back on Earth, it had been far from a universal truth. It applied to Elijah’s experiences with cultivation, though. And that was all that mattered for his current situation.
Because he hadn’t forgotten Zek’s warnings about Ithalon. The leaders there could very well welcome him with open arms, but he didn’t expect as much. Hoped, perhaps. But his optimism had been proven unwarranted on too many occasions for him to depend on it as a realistic predictor of future events.
So, he’d chosen to prepare for the worst.
That was why he’d veered off course and headed toward the location Zek’s maps told him to avoid at all costs. The obelisk was the remnant of one of the planet’s Primal Realms. It wasn’t the one that had eventually exploded into a well of corruption – that was near the planet’s south pole – but in the aftermath of excisement, it had eventually become a hotbed of corruption.
Even the abyssal monsters avoided it.
However, Elijah saw it as a unique opportunity. He’d already exceeded the norm for cultivation at his current stage, and by no small degree. But if he could manage to push his body to the next tier, it would not only help him in the short run, but it could also give him more options when it finally came time to upgrade his class.
What’s more, Elijah felt certain that he’d put his body through enough punishment that he was ready to make the final push to the next tier.
This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.
Still, he hesitated.
Not because of the danger. That, he accepted as part of the process. Rather, he very much dreaded the pain he would soon force himself to endure. To prepare, he’d spent the past month slowly subjecting himself to longer spans without his mantle for protection. At first, he could only endure a few minutes, but now, he’d managed to push that to more than an hour before his body started breaking down.
That was nothing compared to what was coming, though. In the past, advancing his cultivation had taken weeks. This would almost assuredly take a month or more.
A month of pain.
A month of having his body ripped apart and corrupted.
Could he endure it? He believed he could, and when it was finished, he would be more powerful than ever. But being capable of taking that kind of punishment didn’t mean he could do so without hesitation.
It reminded him of a memory from his childhood. It was his first time on a high dive. Climbing the ladder had been easy enough, but when he finally found himself poised at the end of that platform, he couldn’t help but hesitate. Part of him had wanted nothing more than to turn back and descend the same way he’d ascended. Yet, everyone was watching. His parents. His sister. His friends.
In the end, that had pushed him to close his eyes and jump. It was far from a graceful dive, and he’d ended up hitting the water stomach-first. Despite the pain, though, that act had allowed him to overcome his fear. From then on, he’d never hesitated to take the plunge.
This was different, though. There was no one to judge him for turning back. Just his self-appraisal. And his overwhelming desire to push forward.
It drove him to take that first step. Then, even as he deactivated his Mantle of Authority, he slid down the crater’s slope. Every inch of that descent came with a surge in corruption that felt like someone had poured acid over his entire body.
Worse, even.
He’d been doused in acid a few times, and it was nothing compared to how sliding down that crater felt. And that remembered pain paled in comparison to the corruption currently trying to invade his body.
Elijah let it seep in and suffocate his cells, and black veins tore across his emerald scales. He allowed it, knowing that he was a long way from the point of no return.
When he reached the bottom of the crater, he hesitated for only a second. The caustic atmosphere was far more punishing than he’d expected, and he was forced to recenter himself before pushing forward. Finally, after taking a deep breath that burned his lungs, he took a step.
Then another.
Moving in his dragon form took far more energy, both in terms of ethera and native stamina. However, it also came with a significant increase in durability that he knew he’d need if he was meant to survive all the way to the end.
One step followed the other, and soon, Elijah found himself plodding along. Every hundred feet or so, the atmosphere grew heavier. The density of the ethera soon doubled, and the effects of the corruption kept pace. One minute became two, then three, and on and on. More than an hour passed, and Elijah felt every second of it.
He couldn’t simply push the pain away. It was so pervasive that it couldn’t be quarantined in a single leaf. Indeed, it couldn’t be separated at all, and it had quickly overwhelmed every facet of his mind. The only choice was to embrace it. Endure it. To welcome it.
Elijah did just that, sinking deeper with every step forward.
Not just because of the promise of power at the end of the road. That contributed, but Elijh was also driven forward by necessity. By the power of his stubborn will. And most of all, by his desire to prove to himself that he could conquer any obstacle set before him.
That belief wavered with every passing foot.
But it never broke.
Not after the first hundred yards, and not after the first ten miles, either.
He continued on, mile after mile. Every so often, he was forced to purge the corruption. It mimicked the training he’d already endured, though with far more intensity. Each instance of cleansing – at the end of his condensed Mantle of Authority – reset his body to a new baseline.
And the following span saw him enduring the corruption for a little longer.
His body sprouted tumors. His scales ruptured. His muscles quavered under the strain, and his heart skipped thousands of beats. Yet, he persisted, righting the wrongs via his Mantle of Authority, combined with the power of his various healing spells.
Body cultivation wasn’t about enduring damage without end. It was about slowly building up to becoming something better. Elijah took that philosophy with him, carrying it gradually toward the obelisk in the distance. Even as it grew larger on the horizon, Elijah couldn’t escape just how monumental it was.
Miles wide at the base, its height was inestimable. Somewhere up above, massive abyssal monsters dwelled, though the powerful creatures refused to descend to the surface of the planet. Thankfully, that held true even in the densely energetic crater.
The ground was even, so there were no physical obstacles to Elijah’s progress. Only the ever-escalating damage to his body, mind, and soul.
Amidst the pain, time lost all meaning. It could have been days. The journey might have taken mere hours. But every step came with new agony, muddling his thoughts and clouding his perception of time and space.
There was always the next step, though.
As the atmosphere thickened, gravity itself pressed down on him with new power. His bones creaked with every movement, and his healing spells struggled to keep his body together.
And that was at the halfway point.
Elijah very nearly stopped there. It was more than he’d ever experienced, which meant that it was probably enough to spur his progress to the next stage of body cultivation. He could feel the power inside, waiting to envelope and evolve his form.
Yet, he’d set a goal, and he refused to stop short. So long as he could keep going, he would. Anything less than reaching the obelisk was absolutely unacceptable.
The next few miles were the worst, but he kept telling himself that it would all be worth it in the end. Over and over, those words echoed in his mind until even they gave way to the pain to which he’d subjected himself. He couldn’t escape the agony. He didn’t even try.
He just accepted it.
And eventually, he reached his destination.
The silver surface of the obelisk shimmered with corruption, heat, and ethera. The abyssal energy was so powerful that tiny, black motes danced in the air. At first, Elijah thought they were just spots in his vision, but each time they touched his skin, a blistering tumor erupted into being. The heat felt like what Elijah imagined the surface of the sun to be. Too hot to endure, and yet, he did just that.
But oddly, the local ethera was the worst.
It infested his veins, flowing through the channels of his soul and pushing him to the edge of his endurance. It was the first time he’d ever experienced ethera poisoning, and it drained his energy as well as scorched the branches of his soul.
His front leg quivered under the simple strain of reaching out to touch the surface of the pillar. When he made contact, his claws turned to ash, then drifted away, leaving only bare bone behind.
Finally, he’d reached his destination.
Now, he simply needed to endure what came next.