Eli gave it until that night before he got back to work, that day he had spent with Tara and Bethany working on getting everyone settled in the new homes and showing them how to get to the ground and how to come back up. Theodore, who had been so busy crafting his rings and necklaces that he hadn't even noticed the changes. They dragged him out of his home and showed him how to use the teleporter to the surface, he immediately studied the runes and used the teleportation pillars until he threw up. He kept studying it so they left him alone since they didn’t want to watch him puke again. A nice nap was had by the three of them just before dark, but when the sun was completely down, Eli left his home and town to finally get another node open.
With six nodes open, this next one was going to take a long time, and he needed to find a place that would have shadow magic to help him. The only thing he had come up with was to go north to the zone of plateau and sink-holes. With sink-holes, there would be caves, and caves are dark so he might find a shadow magic place there. He went to the roof of his home, where there was something resembling a look-out tower, he looked north, almost as far as he could see and blinked to a spot equally high in the air, just many miles away from where he had been. He let himself fall and started feeling out with his magic sense to try and find a cave with shadow magic. He didn’t find a cave, but he found something with shadow magic and guided his fall so he would land on the ground above it.
The thunderous crash that hit the ground shook most of the soil loose making some holes worse and creating new ones. Eli smashed the ground with his cudgel, his Gravity smash skill was stronger than his old skill and it broke the cudgel. That was another thing he was going to need to upgrade, but it wasn’t the time, he had some momentum on his thoughts on shadow magic so he wanted to get started. Punching the ground was his next best option, not having any weapons stronger than his conjured cudgel, which had already broken. He made it down about 25 or 30 feet before he came to a tunnel opening and since he was feeling the source of shadow magic fleeing down the tunnel, he started running.
He gave chase for about fifteen minutes until he caught up to it, it was a shadow monster. It was quite unpleasant, being a mix between a mole and an earthworm but almost 5 feet tall and twenty feet long. The worse part of it was that it smelled like rotting fruit mixed with rotting meat blended with burnt hair and topped with a dirty diaper. He focused his senses and essentially turned off his sense of smell entirely. He then grabbed it by its tail and pulled and squished until it died, then he kept on squeezing like he was emptying a tube of toothpaste. When he was done he had the monster's skin in his hands and was looking at a pile of stinking guts, which he promptly ran away from. He carried the skin to the deepest part of the tunnel that he could find, then he crawled inside the monster skin and twisted to completely wrap himself in it.
There he sat, inside a shadow magic monster's skin as he meditated and began the work on his shadow node. He didn’t know how long this was going to take or if his half transcendent nature would make this easier or harder, but he wasn’t moving until it was done. Not looting the monster whose skin he was now inhabiting let the skin remain instead of dissolving into the ground, but he didn’t know how long that would last. So the first thing he did was try and force the node open with sheer will power, which just gave him a massive headache, and a pain in his chest. The chest pain confused him since his shadow node was in his hip on the opposite side as the death node, right where his left leg attached.
Eli shook it off and began the old fashioned way, which worked pretty well at first. He gathered the bits of shadow magic in his general magic in his body and pushed only those into the node until it cracked and opened. The problem was, after what he guessed was about a day and a half, the node wasn’t operating like his other ones. Every node he had open took in the magic in his body, filtered out the flavors it didn’t want, it then used magic from the corresponding realm to purify it and store it. The higher grade the node the more pure the magic in it and the more it could hold. From his experimenting with his magic his two nodes that were rank ‘planet’, essentially rank 2, had about 3 times the storage with 3 times the purity.
Magical purity was about the purity of the flavor of the magic in the node, when the node is at rank one, it only has that node magic in it, but it has all aspects. Like a rank one fire node would have heat, expansion, consumption, change, etc. All aspects of fire. As the node ranks up it becomes more focused, reducing the number of aspects of that type of magic that it contains. This limits applications of free from magic, or at least weakens them, but makes the aspects that remain far stronger and require less from the node. The problem he was having right now was that his shadow node opened and was already narrow in its focus, like it was already rank 2 or maybe even three.
With the node not functioning properly, and not having any better ideas, he decided to just try and upgrade it. He pulled the magic directly out of the skin he was inside, every single microscopic bit of it and shoved it into his node and compressed it. Nothing happened so he compressed harder, but still nothing, so he reached inside the node with his will and essentially told it to stop screwing around. This also had no effect, but it made him feel a bit better. He held that compressed shadow magic in his node for several hours, then a few days, Eli was really getting worried that his node was broken, but then something happened.
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The magic that he had been holding and compressing tightly in his shadow node was pulled into the node further, or perhaps deeper would be the right description. The shadow magic realm seemed to have eaten it, or absorbed it. The node felt like it was working properly, at level 2, and there was already a skill rune in it. This led to a gut reaction of anger since something made his skill rune without his input but then, after examining it further, he noticed that the skill fit the magic flavor perfectly. It was too perfect, like the magic flavor was adjusted to fit the skill rune, instead of like when he made a skill it was made to match the flavor as closely as possible.
Skill runes were usually pretty intuitive. The runes were a language all its own, a language of the laws of the universe. A rune that says water will make water by consuming magic, like magic is the fuel for the runes action. If a rune said stone, written on a stone, it would consume magic to keep that stone a stone. The rune doesn't just endlessly consume magic, it only uses it to make the rune true. The base rune of water won’t work on its own, there has to be added details on the rune to make it work how you want. Extended lines, additional spirals, curved lines or crossing lines, all change what the rune does. If the base shadow rune is an elongated ‘S’, then his shadow rune looked more like someone used the base rune to stylize a dragon in the most pretentious use of calligraphy ever seen.
To answer his growing questions he opened his status screen to check out the node and skill updates.
“Shadow node - Summon Drakonid - level NA”
“Spell - Supreme - Incantation”
“Speak the incantation and summon a Panic Drake”
“This spell is tied to one specific shadow realm creature.”
“This spell's level reflects the creature's level.”
He did not know what a Panic Drake was, but it sounded vaguely like a dragon, or maybe a baby dragon or smaller variety. He was hoping that the drake caused others to panic, and it wasn’t some kind of panicking drake, that would just be too much. He wanted to summon it right away but since he didn’t know how big it was he decided that it would be better if he climbed out of these tunnels first. He got back to the surface and took a breath of fresh plateau air through his nose, which immediately reminded him that he had spent time in the fresh skin of a monster so he needed a bath. Most monsters and creatures he knew about would have a keen sense of smell so he should probably clean himself off first.
About two miles further north, closer to the middle of the zone, he found a rather large sink-hole with enough water to swim in at the bottom. It kind of reminded him of a quarry that had filled with water since there was a part where you could just walk down to the water that was about fifty feet lower than the top of the large hole. Of course, he wasn’t going to walk down, he jumped in since he wasn’t wearing his mask or cloak and while in mid air removed his ape underwear but held onto it so he could clean it as well as himself. There was a big splash and he stayed underwater cleaning himself off and his underpants for over an hour before he really felt clean. It took a while since they wore these weird arrow eels that kept trying to swim at him and stab their marlin-like sword noses into him.
The eel’s actually dropped some decent loot, there were eight of them and seven dropped epic rarity filets and the last one dropped a sword that looked like their noses but bigger, a one handed long sword, also epic quality. He put all of it into his inventory and decided to take a look at what Bethany had accomplished with all her auctioning. They shared an inventory and system money now so she could just grab stuff from him to sell and put stuff in for him to use. It was a very handy thing for him while he was away, however, he wasn’t expecting it to be almost completely empty. It only had the stuff he had just put in, some water and bread, a few plates of cooked monster meat which it looked like she bought from the auction system and his mask and cloak. The shared inventory meant that they could use each others’ so they were still separate pages and her page had a couple sets of clothes, some armor sets, and a pile of her spears. He almost sent her an angry message until he saw their total money was over 3 billion, the system actually made the display for money larger so that he could see every digit.
Eli took a breath and decided to trust her, she probably had a plan and he didn’t want her to feel like she had to run every decision by him first so he would leave it be. Besides, she had earned his trust by now so there wasn’t anything for him to worry about. Now that he was clean and it was all settled, he lay on the rocky slope that allowed walking in and out of the water soaking in the sun as he dried off the old fashioned way. It was almost time for the auction to open so he figured he would see what it was all about and do some exploring to find this area's raid dungeon until dark, when he would summon his newest friend. After a moment of thought, it would sort of be the family dog so he will pull Bethany to him for the summon so it can get to know her too. His plan was to have it fight with her anyways, since they together would be a closer match to his abilities. Just as he was about to get a nice sun nap started, he heard voices approaching, so he had to decide to cover up and greet them, leave, or just lay there naked and see what happens.
