Chapter 25: Energy From a Lizard

  The ground quaked in low tremors as the earth aether poured around Tom-Tom, thick and heavy like clay being kneaded by invisible hands. Pebbles rattled across the dirt, roots and vines writhed free from the soil. The little kobold was on his knees, chest heaving, his wide eyes blazing green and gold as the power crashed through him.

  “Gods above,” Devon whispered. “He’s really… he’s actually…”

  “Adept,” Allie finished, amused despite herself.

  Garret let out a wild whoop, pounding his fist into his shield. “That’s my boy, Tom-Tom! Show the mountain who’s boss!”

  Even Henry, usually as stony as the cliffs they’d climbed, gave a nod, his mouth curving in what might have been the ghost of a smile. “The little one stands taller than he looks.”

  Then something changed.

  Alex watched as the dense ochre swirl of earth aether around the kobold shuddered, faltered, and above Tom-Tom’s head, a glow began to bloom. Golden and radiant, nothing like the elemental power from below the ground. It gathered in slow streams, a mist coiling downward like strands of sunlight woven into air.

  Alex froze. He’d seen this once before, with Holly. That golden cloud that had crowned her when she pushed through her transformation. He’d thought it a fluke back then, an oddity. But here it was again.

  Obby didn’t whisper in his head this time, he screamed. “Gather it! Now, before it disperses! Meatboy, do not waste this chance again!”

  Alex hesitated, watching the golden aether condense over Tom-Tom like a blessing, dripping slowly into him. Was it right to take from it? Did he even understand what it was?

  “DO IT!” Obby thundered, his tone filled with apparent desperation. “It’s important! More important than anything else you’ve stolen from this cursed world! Take it before it’s gone!”

  The shouting in his mind shook Alex’s concentration. Just like last time, Obby wasn’t just insistent, he was frantic, with rage boiling in the edges of his tone like a man screaming at a fool who wouldn’t move from a collapsing bridge.

  “Dammit,” Alex hissed under his breath.

  He stretched his awareness out, reaching with the faintest touch of his bodygate. Just a thread, just a tether to see if he could catch it, and the golden aether answered him. It was only a tiny bit, a small fragment of a slice of the golden misty power, but even that tiny amount was enough. Once it touched his bodygate, it poured through him like a flood breaking a dam. And the moment it entered, the world split open.

  A thousand voices thundered in unison, speaking not words, but harmonics of light and sound so pure they seared straight into his soul. His Soulspace convulsed, every shard of his Mage Core blazing with reflection of that golden brilliance which invaded it. He was no longer kneeling by the mountain door, no longer standing among his friends, he was everywhere.

  He felt his veins become rivers of sunlight. His marrow, freshly infused with wyrm-poison, sang as the golden current bathed it, tempered and purified it without erasing its venom. His bones glowed in his mind’s eye, wrapped in twin strands of gold fire. His soulspace mended, the cracks sealing shut, the scorch marks from the dragonic fight wiped away, the foundation—which bore acidic holes—made clean and new. The energy revitalized him in a way he didn’t think possible.

  And above all, he felt seen, watched. Not by Obby. Not by the squad. Not even by The System. By something else, something vast. Something that weighed him against a scale that stretched across eternity and back.

  Alex’s knees buckled, his breath ripped from his chest as his vision filled with golden script that wasn’t System text, but something older, written straight into the fabric of his soul. Inside his soulspace, he screamed as heaven itself broke inside his mind. Because what felt like a welcoming wash of purity and love, changed as the golden current turned on him.

  What had begun as radiance bathing his marrow became wildfire ripping through his veins, shredding and clawing at his already strained soulspace. The brilliance no longer nurtured him and instead it devoured. His bones screamed under the strain, the wyrm-poison boiling as if it were being scoured from existence.

  Alex fell to one knee in his mindscape, his vision fracturing into shards of light. He understood in an instant, with a cold clarity sharper than any blade: this was power he wasn’t meant to touch.

  Like a child grabbing a sun. Like a Mortal Tier mage trying to weave Celestial aether. He wasn’t ready, he couldn’t be. The golden tide was unmaking him piece by piece, and there was no resisting it.

  Then Obby coughed and spoke, releasing a single note of sound.

  The strange note vibrated through their arcane bond, a strange sort of resonance, a deep and primordial hum that pulled the golden tide toward him. The brilliance warped, stretched, and twisted as if the sentient stone had turned into a black hole in Alex’s soulspace. All that golden might, the very energy that had threatened to unravel him, growled as it was dragged down into the knot of their shared bond.

  Alex realized, horror freezing his breath, that this had been the plan all along.

  He wanted this. He knew it would come. He tricked me into reaching for it.

  The dread in his heart was so thick that he was choking. He could see it playing out: Obby swelling with divine fuel, warping into something no mortal vessel could contain, tearing Alex’s body into a husk as he claimed it for himself.

  And then, it was gone. All of it.

  The golden storm was swallowed down to the last spark. Silence fell over his soulspace, the fractured Mage Core still dim, the Wyrm-heart still pulsing softly above it. And floating there in his small, eldritch, wrong-shaped hallucination of a body, Obby looked exactly the same as always.

  The pebble-creature tilted its creepy, pointed-tooth grin. “Good. Knew you could do it, meatboy.” It sounded to be almost… gleeful. “Once that cooks down, I’ll be able to unlock more features. Maybe even help you with your spellwork, guide your aether flows, cast for you if you’re too busy bleeding out. Lots of cool things, no problem.”

  Alex’s chest still heaved with phantom pain, his soul trembling from the sheer scale of what he’d touched. He stared at the little rock’s hallucinatory body, fear simmering under his skin. Obby sounded… happy. A nonchalance tinged with a cheerful simmer.

  And that terrified him more than if the thing had shown fangs.

  “What was that? That almost killed me.” Alex said into his mindscape.

  “Eh.” Obby waved a tendril made of nothing but aether and illusion. “Just some ascendant energy. A tiny nibble. Nothing more. Exactly the kind of stuff an enchanted object like me needs. Like I said, it’s good. Promise.”

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  Alex clenched his fists. His marrow still sang faintly, his soulspace still buzzing like a tuning fork made of glass. He couldn’t tell if the little pebble was lying, or if he truly didn’t understand the siginificants of what it had stolen. Either way, it was too late. He had taken it in. He had fed it to Obby.

  And there was no going back.

  All he could do was look forward from here, to prepare. Try to make sense of this nightmare of a sentient rock masquerading as his ally. He would have to talk to Obby again, really talk, not the half-banter they always fell into. But that was for later. For now, he only stood in his battered soulspace, breathless, his skin still tingling with golden fire long since gone, and tried not to shake.

  The golden storm had faded. The weight of Obby’s words echoed once more in his mind, “promise”, and then the soulspace bled away, collapsing into the dark.

  Alex blinked awake. The world returned in a haze of sound and smells. He caught whiff of pine resin in the air, soil damp beneath his knees, fire crackled somewhere close. And Holly.

  Her arm was already braced around his shoulders, holding him steady, her warmth pressed firm into his side. She was breathing fast, her lips parted like she had been calling his name, though no sound came now. Her eyes said enough. They were wide and worried, but searching too, as if she had seen something, felt something, but couldn’t put words to it.

  Alex swallowed, his throat far too dry. He remembered Holly’s own Adept Tier transformation, the golden radiance that had nearly broken her apart, but rebuilt her just as quickly, upgraded her. The way she had screamed until her lungs were near to bursting, her essence fracturing and knitting itself back together in divine light. Even back then, he knew none of the others saw it. Only he had seen it through his ability, his [Aether Sight], and his [Aether Attuned Body] that provided a resonance with the energy in ways he couldn’t put into words. The hues of aether, the rhythm of power that painted the world in colors no one else could grasp.

  And he was the only one who had seen the golden cloud above Tom-Tom, too. Which meant Holly hadn’t seen what he had just done. Hadn’t seen him reach out and steal an iota of that golden radiance, the storm nearly ripping him apart. She just thought…

  Alex forced a smile, thin as paper. “Thanks. I felt really strange there for a moment. Probably the ritual thing catching up to me.”

  Her gaze lingered on him long enough that he feared she might push. That she might see through the mask he was wearing. But, Holly only pressed herself more firmly into him, grounding him with her presence, offering support with no questions asked.

  He let out a shaky breath and pulled her closer, feeble arms wrapping her in a brief embrace. The smile on his lips was more for her than him, a small thing to keep her from worrying further. Inside, his chest still felt squeezed, scraped hollow by golden heat. And Obby’s cheery tone still hummed in his mind, like a song he didn’t want to learn the words to.

  How long can I keep this secret? The thought gnawed at him. How long before it’s too late?

  He shook it off. Not now. Not here.

  Shouts broke the tension. Alex glanced up to see Tom-Tom at the center of the group, the earthy aura still clinging to his small frame like a mantle of stone dust. The kobold grinned wide, his teeth sharp and crooked, his tail lashing back and forth in jittery excitement as the others crowded him.

  Garret clapped him so hard on the shoulder the little guy almost toppled. Devon, grinning ear to ear, was already comparing his attributes, rattling off numbers about how much stronger Tom-Tom would be now. Even Kate gave a small nod of approval, her sharp eyes less guarded for once.

  Tom-Tom basked in it all, puffing out his chest, soaking every bit of praise like warm sunlight on dull scales. For once, the little kobold didn’t look like a straggler, or a party mascot. He looked like part of them.

  Alex watched the scene unfold, a genuine smile tugging at his lips this time.

  “Well, he’s earned it,” Alex murmured under his breath. “We can’t keep pushing him aside forever. And the little guy is hell of a hard worker.”

  Holly leaned closer at that, her expression softening as she followed his gaze to Tom-Tom.

  The kobold had caught up. Adept Tier, like the rest of them. Which meant there’d be no holding him back when they stepped into the dungeon.

  Which was okay with Alex, he didn’t want to leave anyone behind once they stepped inside, leave them alone out here. It would have been a somber set of events had they been forced to do it.

  The excitement slowly died down, each member eventually peeling away from Tom-Tom to go train and cultivate once more. The kobold himself decided to curl up and take a nap, a well deserved one, if Alex had anything to say about it.

  Once he cleaned up the residue from his little ritual, Alex himself sat down and continued his own cultivation. There were a lot of changes he had made to his status screen, and after pumping all his available experience points into his willpower attribute—once again—he managed to push the stat to a base twenty-nine.

  By far it was still his highest stat, and he was nearing the final Earth Tribulation for it as well, something Alex had no doubt would catapult its potency past the rest of his attributes. He was nearing that threshold where his stats would become too lopsided if he wasn’t careful.

  He was still very much following the line of thinking that willpower was his best stat to invest in. Despite Obby’s insistence otherwise, because fuck that crazy evil pebble. And because willpower was his means of pushing his greatest unique asset higher and higher, his [Aether Attuned Body].

  The ability was the only reason Alex was still able to stand among the mages and their intact mage cores.

  And it was how he was so far ahead in Adept Tier compared to the rest of his friends. The ability might not have him min/maxing his stats as well, like the element-attuned core upgrades do, but it made Alex a real monster when compared to everyone else. It was almost like the Heavenly System was treating him as an Arcane Beast, his lack of a mage core being offset by sheer attribute numbers.

  But he still had spells and his martial style, unlike a beast, placing him a step above.

  So without a doubt, his attuned body ability was his priority, even if it had fallen to the side partially due to other upgrades in the recent days. But now, he was back on track, and had plenty of time to use both his bodygates, and his immense willpower stat to their full potential.

  As everyone else trained for the rest of the day, Alex sat in meditation, cultivating on his [Dual Three-Fold Condensing Spiral] technique, a name Alex knew he would have to change, as it was once more getting far too unruly in length.

  Regardless, his aether gates sang happily as he pulled in the ambient energy of the world around him, already seeing that next attribute threshold in his sights. The Seraph Dust tea was already brewed and waiting, as Alex was stubbornly determined to cultivate until the breakthrough.

  He would reach [Aether Attuned Body] (70.0%), earn his next attribute boost, and push through the final earth tribulation for his Willpower stat. Only then, would he feel even a little confident about entering the dungeon.

  There was little doubt The System would throw hell and brimstone at them all inside that dungeon, and Alex would be ready for it.

  ***

  //ANOMALY REVIEW REPORT:

  //ACCESS LEVEL: Administrator (Obfuscated)

  //REQUEST SOURCE: Internal Anomaly Monitor – Keter

  //LOG CONTEXT: Progress Evaluation – Subject #0117–A ("Alex")

  //STATUS: Internal Flag: Pending Review

  START OF RECORD:

  :://Event Flag: Unauthorized Energy Diversion//

  //Subject Identifier: Worldstrider [Alexander Pierce]//

  //Core Status: N/A (Mage Core: Absent)//Auxiliary Organ: Wyrm-Heart (Upgraded: Stable)//

  //Event Trace: Concurrent Advancement of Companion Unit [Designation: Tom-Tom] → Adept-tier evolution//

  //Detected Anomaly: Energy interference during transfer event//Authorization Level: NONE//

  //Probability of Unauthorized Success: <0.8%//Actual Outcome: Complete//

  //System Reaction//Reaction Index: Elevated → Warning Threshold exceeded//Containment Feasibility: Currently Insufficient.

  //Performance Evaluation//Innovation: Exceptional/Unstable//Adaptability: High//Compliance: 02% (Critical Deviation)//Overall Risk Factor: Severe Escalation//

  //Future Projection//Likelihood of Trial Survival: Uncertain—both catastrophic failure and extraordinary ascension viable//Monitoring Level: Maximum//

  Encouragement: Withheld.//

  :://LOG END//