The sea was calm, standing in stark contrast to the storm raging in Elijah's mind. The leaves that represented his cultivation – all eighty-one of them – rustled in the wind of his anticipation. His body reflected that tension, preventing him from enjoying the simple joy of floating in the ocean.
To calm himself, he focused on Soul of the Wild. The ability was powerful, but in recent months, it had proven itself to be slightly less flawless than he'd once taken it to be. Just like any other ability, it had its limits. The spell was fantastic at detecting life, and of all sorts. If he concentrated on it, he could sense organisms as small as individual bacteria. However, that required focus, and as he'd discovered during his pursuit of Gunnar – the sniper who'd recently tried to kill him – that sort of focus wasn't always easy.
So of those limitations had been mitigated by the addition of seventy-two new partitions within his mind. Once, he'd thought of them as facets, but that was when they'd been divided into nine gem-like structures. Now, they were represented as nine branches of nine crystalline leaves, each one capable of containing independent strains of thought.
It wasn't quite like having eighty-one brains stuffed into his head, but it definitely allowed him to support multiple threads of thought at once. Including monitoring his locus, which had more than tripled in size, and Soul of the Wild.
The other limitation of that spell was that it was terrible at detecting inanimate objects. Normally, he got around that by focusing on the life clinging to most things. It gave him a rough idea of his surroundings, but it was like looking at an out-of-focus picture. Good for estimates, and invaluable for finding threats, but far from foolproof.
Perhaps he'd gain an upgrade to the ability soti soon.
With everything he had planned, he suspected he'd gain quite a lot of levels in the coming years.
Because, after spending the past six months making very little progress – regarding levels and the Primal Realms – he knew he couldn't afford to stay on that path. For one, ignoring progress, both in terms of levels and cultivation, was like an itch in his mind that he couldn't scratch. For another, the world simply couldn't afford for him to take ti out to rest, relax, and ntally recuperate.
And finally, his enemies certainly weren't resting on their laurels. Gunnar had proven that, even though Elijah still enjoyed a significant lead on the rest of the world, he was not invulnerable. He wanted to believe that the sniper was unique, and maybe he was. But Elijah suspected that Gunnar only represented sothing he'd read a thousand tis in various guides.
Specialized roles allowed people to outperform their levels. Maybe only in one, very specific act – but in that arena, they were unmatched. It took massive advantages in levels and cultivation to counter them.
For soone like Gunnar, that specialization was hitting soone extrely hard from a huge distance. Sure, he supplented that with traps and equipnt, but none of that would have mattered if he couldn't shoot people from up to five miles away.
Or further. Elijah hadn't exactly gotten out the asuring tape when he was running through traps and getting peppered by bullets the size of artillery shells.
Either way, it was a reminder that even if his reticence to jump back into progression was justified, the world kept turning. Everyone else kept leveling. Learning. Cultivating. They wouldn't stop on his account. And given the number of enemies he'd made, sotis just by occupying the top spot, but in other instances, because of his actions, he couldn't afford to stand still.
Maybe one day.
But that day was a long way off. Still, he'd have preferred to have at least a few minutes of peace before he got back into it.
He opened his eyes to see an overcast sky. Gray clouds heralded rain, and he knew it wouldn't be long before the seas responded. So, Elijah flipped over and swam the three miles to shore. Along the way, he decided to test his attributes by pushing himself as fast as possible.
And he wasn't disappointed when he reached speeds usually reserved for old school cigarette boats – the sort he might've seen in now-ancient episodes of Miami Vice. Once, he and his sister had been obsessed with watching old reruns of the classic television series.
Was it as good as he rembered? Probably not. The sa could be said for all the programs from that era. If he tried to re-watch sothing like A-Team or Knight Rider, he knew he'd co away disappointed. Nostalgia obviously did quite a lot of heavy lifting when it ca to his perceptions of the past.
Which was fine. Elijah was perfectly okay with looking at the past through a rose-tinted lens.
Sotis, it was better than looking at reality, which included multiple unconquered Primal Realms, a faction deadset on killing him, and a tir steadily ticking down towards the world's excisent. Compared to that, it was much easier to consider the adventures of Crockett and Tubbs.
Regardless, he quickly reached the beach, where he took a few minutes to air dry. Once, he might've gone swimming naked, but with others living on the island, those days were long gone.
He chuckled, rembering his first tower run. Back then, his clothes had quickly been destroyed, so he'd spent most of that ti in the nude. He almost missed those simpler tis – right up until he rembered being digested by a whale. That brought his sense of nostalgia to a screeching halt.
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While drying, he took the opportunity to test his strength. He'd gained a lot of attributes since the last ti he'd done so, and he was eager to rediscover his limits. But it only took a few minutes to discover that he wouldn't find those limitations on the island. None of his rocks were big enough to tax his might.
Not even the big hunk of basalt that was at least eight feet wide. Given the typical density of that kind of rock, Elijah guessed it weighed close to twenty tons, and the only problem he had when trying to lift it ca from the lack of good handholds. He solved that issue by digging his own.
However, sothing he did find interesting was that the rock was a lot harder than it should have been. Basalt was typically a very dense and durable rock, but this particular boulder should never have been capable of resisting his attempts to dig into its surface. The only viable explanation was that even the island's inanimate parts had absorbed a significant amount of ethera.
The implications that ca from that thought were striking. Would it eventually beco so hard that mortals could never hope to mine it? Or would it level off at so point? And what about planets that had been bathed in similar levels of ethera for millions of years?
More than once, Elijah had noticed that the environnt was more durable than it probably should have been. On Chira Island, he'd once pulled himself through a crevice that was slightly too small for him to fit. If it had been comprised of normal rock, it should have just crumbled. However, it maintained its shape, remaining unmoved, and when Elijah pulled himself through, his flesh gave way before the rock.
At the ti, he hadn't really considered what that ant, but now, it seed obvious that the world was absorbing ethera to make itself stronger. How that all worked together, he had no idea, but it was clear enough that he was willing to accept it as fact.
Regardless, being able to lift a twenty-ton rock – and not even reach his limit – was an incredible feat, and one he'd never expected to achieve. It was just further evidence that the world had rapidly changed, and it wasn't going to stop anyti soon.
Still, he knew that most people would never reach those heights. Ironshore was one of the richest and most successful cities on the planet, at least as far as Elijah knew. But the average level was only around thirty or thirty-five. Sure, there were exceptions. In Ironshore, those were mostly crafters or self-styled adventurers who traveled from one tower to another in search of levels and loot. But most people just didn't see the need to focus on progress. So long as they had what they needed to live a decent life, they were happy enough to stagnate.
Elijah knew he could never go down that road.
Once, that might have been a possibility. His apathy in his old job as a marine biologist was well-explored. Yet, the second chance he'd gotten when the World Tree extended its branches to Earth had not gone unnoticed. He'd seen it for what it was, and since then, he had lived a very different sort of life.
He needed to get back to that.
With that in mind, as soon as he was mostly dry, he grabbed his shirt from within his Arcane Loop, donned it, and headed inland. The island's ethera levels were noticeably higher than they had been only three days before. The induction of so many people all at once had increased the density by approximately ten percent. But that wasn't the only effect of the recent additions.
Even now, nearly a hundred people road the island on one task or another. Many of them were children, though there were two distinct groups. The kids from Ironshore were hard at work drilling with various weapons, while the sea elves were still trying to get their feet under them. So even clung to their parents – or guardians, given that many of their mothers and fathers had perished when their village had been raided by pirates – though curiosity had gotten the better of many of them.
Thankfully, the wildlife, much of which was dangerous, left them alone. Such was the benefit of their attunents combined with their induction into the grove.
The adults were only a little different from the children. So, like Biggle and Kurik, went about their business as normal. But the sea elves were unsure of their places, and they were quite tentative about their actions.
One day, that would change.
Upon reaching the grove, Elijah was quick to find Nerthus. The spryggent was currently tending to the coffee trees, and Elijah took a mont to simply admire the flows of ethera surrounding the grove's caretaker. They were dizzyingly complex, and though Elijah had so experience with that kind of thing – via Nature's Design – he still had difficulty tracking his friend's actions.
It was further evidence that he had a long way to go.
"Would you like to help?" asked Nerthus without looking away from his task. He stood, his hands extended toward one particular tree, his fingers connected to its trunk with thick threads of attuned ethera. Elijah recognized fire and water intertwined with nature.
"I won't get in the way?" Elijah asked.
"Of course you will," the spryggent answered. "That doesn't an you shouldn't try. How else are we ant to learn?"
Elijah couldn't argue with that assessnt, so he stepped forward and focused on his sense of ethera. He was tempted to extend his Mantle of Authority, but he kept it close.
It only had three purposes. The first was like a bludgeon ant to nullify the energy around him. It didn't discriminate between friend or foe, crude as it was. The second and third functions were two sides of the sa coin. One ca with an injection of vitality while the other cleansed unwanted contaminates.
Mostly, he used his Mantle of Authority to aid in healing, but he'd also employed it to cleanse the entirety of Central Park of the contamination that ca from a neglected and powerful rift.
Whatever the case, he didn't think any of that would be helpful in growing a tree. Even if it was, that wasn't the point.
Instead, he used Nature's Design, which served to both enhance his perception of those threads and bolster his ability to manipulate them. The first ti he'd truly explored the ability, he'd done so in an effort to create a sunflower that could filter nuclear fallout – mixed with ethera – from the atmosphere surrounding a failed nuclear power plant. But since then, he'd used it a few other tis, most notably to grow his Primal Realm trees.
So, using it on sothing so mundane as a coffee tree was a novel experience.
Oddly enough, his target was no less powerful than any of his creations. They were highly specialized and, in retrospect, a bit clumsy. By comparison, the coffee tree was much more stable. Peaceful. Sedate. But still with a thread of strength that was undeniable.
Over the next couple of hours, Nerthus guided Elijah's taphysical hand, and in doing so, taught him more about the nature of trees than he could have ever learned on his own. It was also a strangely ditative experience that left him much calr than when he had begun.
The lesson was simple enough to learn. He hadn't exactly neglected his exploration of nature and its many facets, but he hadn't focused on it either. He hadn't had ti. Or maybe that was just what he told himself. Regardless, he resolved that, going forward, he would make ti.
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