Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO ON KINDLE SEPT. 2)

Elijah sank to his knees, exhausted by his efforts. He’d managed to cleanse one chamber, leaving a blanket of vitality behind, but the corruption continued through an adjacent tunnel. It grew much weaker, and to the point where he suspected it wouldn’t take much more effort to complete the job. But he’d pushed himself to his limits. Now, he needed rest.

With that in mind, he remained in place, his knees digging into the loamy turf as he meditated on his core. It had begun to sprout, though only just. A few tiny tendrils had wiggled free of the seed it had become, but he could sense that it would take quite a long time to complete the process.

One thing he had noticed was that it seemed to respond to his actions even more than it did to his various attempts to force it to grow through meditation. Both were effective, but simply acting according to his instincts was head and shoulders above any other strategy.

There was meaning there.

Maybe it was like Sadie’s mind cultivation, which needed the framework of her code to work properly. Or it could have been something more ephemeral. Something he didn’t quite understand. Probably the last one, considering how ignorant he truly was. He’d studied what he could, but his situation was so unique that finding applicable information was exceedingly difficult. Even when he discovered something, it was typically incomplete and barely useful.

Certainly, he’d pieced things together as best he could, but he knew better than most just how many blind spots remained.

As always, he had no choice but to forge ahead, hopeful that he was on the right track. In that endeavor, following his instincts seemed the best strategy, even if he wish his decisions were more consciously made.

In any case, Elijah remained in place for a few hours, meditating on his core as his ethereal channels recovered from the punishment to which they had been subjected. As he’d discovered while cleansing Central Park, his ability to use his Mantle of Authority was finite. After only a few hours of continuous use, the branches of his soul began to burn, and it only got worse from there.

Eventually, they began to retract – almost like a failsafe so he didn’t overextend himself. Could he bypass that natural reaction? Probably. But he suspected that doing so would result in grievous injury. And given that he wasn’t really on a timetable – aside from the one imposed by the system itself – he decided that caution was the better path.

After he felt his soul recover, he spent another hour or two eating one of his prepared meals. This time, it was wild pheasant on a bed of rice. Instead of the relatively small birds from pre-transformation Earth, this animal had clearly been as large as a turkey. So, there was plenty of meat, and it had been prepared with a medley of vegetables. To call the meal satisfying would have been a serious understatement. He savored every bite, vowing to order it again the next time he stocked up in Ironshore.

Once he’d finished eating, he had a grove fruit for dessert, then followed that with a cup of coffee. More to refresh his buff than because he wanted to enjoy it.

By the time he was done, his body and soul felt fully recovered. So he cleaned up after himself, shoved everything into his Arcane Loop, then headed into the tunnel. He’d already cleansed the short passage, but he still extended his senses to ensure he hadn’t missed anything. However, after five hundred feet of a steep decline, he’d found nothing.

That changed when he reached the next chamber, which was a swampy morass that should have been teeming with life. No longer. Like the fallen forest, its fat stumpy trees had been sapped of all vitality, turning them into that crumbly, black stuff that was neither alive nor dead. It was just inert.

Normally, swamps were unpleasant due to a combination of insects, stagnant water, horrible smells, and mud that made them all but impassible. In this case, it was a foulness of a different sort. As Elijah waded into the boggy mess, he felt like he was moving through a cesspool.

But worse, because of the unnatural lack of life. Not only were there no animals or insects, but the flora had been drained as well. It twisted Elijah’s stomach with a combination of nausea and anxiety.

He extended his Mantle of Authority to its full breadth, and the boughs of his soul cleansed and healed the environment. The radius wasn’t large – maybe fifteen feet, all told – but in that area, vitality returned to the swamp. It would take a long time for it to fully recover, but the seeds of life were there.

Gradually, he moved through the swamp. Every step brought with it peace, vitality, and nature. But it was slow going. Elijah was committed, though. He had no other choice.

Thankfully, the affected area was much more compact than the previous chamber. The fallen forest had been miles wide, and the swamp was even larger. However, the corruption clearly hadn’t had time to progress more than a few hundred yards from the mouth of the connecting tunnel.

Elijah cleansed it.

But in doing so, he sensed something else. Something both encouraging and troubling. It actually took a few minutes for him to truly register the presence of a powerful guardian and a potent natural treasure, but once he did, he could scarcely contain his giddiness.

Part of his excitement came from the fact that, even with the corruption creeping so close, a guardian had managed to survive. He also felt a sense of accomplishment because he hadn’t just saved the swamp or the forest – both admirable goals – but a guardian as well.

But then he realized something else that felt like someone had plunged a knife into his chest.

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Guardians were naturally driven to confront rifts and spontaneously appearing voxx. Elijah had first-hand experience with it, as the panther had done just that, protecting the ancestral tree as well as Elijah himself right after the world had transformed. It was a natural imperative.

So, why hadn’t the guardian – whatever it was – dealt with the rifts?

Elijah knew he needed to investigate.

He waded forward. Void of corruption, the swamp was technically healthy. There was vitality in there. However, most of the wildlife had died. A few hundred feet from the line of demarcation that represented the extent of the corruption’s spread, he found a lifeless snake. He bent down, running his fingers along its scales. The thing felt like an empty hose. All of its fluids – indeed, much of its mass – had been drained, leaving only a dry husk behind.

Over the next hour, he found more of the same.

After examining the latest victim, which was a small, rat-like mammal that reminded Elijah of a nutria, Elijah stepped forward and sensed something he hadn’t expected. Only a few moments later, he saw it.

Gossamer webs draped across the stubby branches of the mangrove-like trees, extending all the way to the stagnant water. And in those webs were suspended the corpses of various animals. Most were normal swamp dwellers with which he’d become familiar. Reptiles and birds, bats and huge insects – nothing really out of the ordinary, given the setting.

However, as he stepped past that first wave of webs, Elijah sensed something curious. He followed his instincts and tracked the curiosity down, only to find that something truly odd had been caught in the web.

It looked like a combination of a leech, lamprey, and a horseshoe crab. The first, because it was packed with enough blood that, when Elijah touched it, the thing burst like an overfilled balloon, coating his hand and forearm. However, it also featured a ring of fangs that reminded him of nothing so much as the afore-mentioned blood-sucking parasite.

But it was also armored like an insect or a crab, with the resemblance to a horseshoe crab being rooted in the long spine extending from its backside.

All-in-all, it was only about a foot long, but even with it being dead, Elijah could feel the hunger in it. It was very different from what he felt with the corruption of rifts, the abyss, or monsters like the voxx, though. With those creatures, it was an unnatural and all-consuming greed. With this creature – which felt as natural as anything else – it was more like a driving instinct to feed.

On the surface, the gap between those two might not have seemed all that wide, but to Elijah, they might as well have been on different worlds. There was a stark contrast between them, and one Elijah could sense as easily as he could feel the life all around him.

However, he couldn’t deny the disgust he felt when looking at the creature. It wasn’t dissimilar to what he felt when he looked at the undead creatures around Hong Kong. And given the relative proximity of the troll Primal Realm – which was themed around blood – Elijah could only conclude that these creatures were the result of said proximity.

Of course, he couldn’t be certain. For all he knew, the beast was a native to swamps the multi-verse over. But his instincts said that it had been caused by the Primal Realm and the aura it emitted.

Elijah decided to investigate further, if only because, in the grand scheme of nature, guardians were incredibly important.

Over the next hour or so, he continued forward, and the webs as well as the blood beasts became even more ubiquitous. Elijah even saw a host of small spiders – maybe a foot or so across – that had been drained just like the other wildlife.

The entire swamp had fallen into an eerie silence that was made even more uncomfortable because it didn’t lack vitality. The corrupted forest was disgusting and infuriating, but it almost felt more appropriate than a swamp with no living animals. No insects. No snakes, fish, or turtles. Just a morass of death and spider webs.

For the next couple of hours, Eliah waded forward. Idly, he considered shifting forms, but he ultimately chose not to, largely because he’d been spending a lot of time in his bestial shapes, and he needed to remain in his natural form for a bit. If the price of maintaining his humanity was a little discomfort, then he was more than willing to endure that.

Elijah heard the battle long before he saw it.

A squishy sound, like someone rubbing wet latex together, filled the air. Barely audible, but unmissable. Elijah hurried forward, cutting through the stagnant water as he tried to ignore the mud and decaying matter between his toes.

Slowly, the sound grew louder until he saw something truly horrifying.

A mound of blood beasts stood before him. There weren’t just hundreds or thousands of the creatures. There were tens of thousands, and though none of them were particularly powerful, the collective threat they represented was unignorable.

As one, the beasts turned, almost as if they could sense him.

Perhaps they could.

They surged, like a wave of flesh, fangs, and shells. Elijah had no intention of letting them overwhelm him, so he leaped as high as he could, then bounded even higher using Cloud Step.

He reached the apex of his jump in the nick of time, and even as he transformed into the Shape of the Sky, he saw the wave of blood beasts crash down on the spot he’d just vacated. They swirled like a frenzy, clearly angry and confused by the sudden disappearance of their prey.

Some of the blood of the beast he’d examined, diluted by swamp water, dripped from his hand, landing on one of the creatures.

They all went wild.

Like starving piranha attacking a haunch of meat, they swarmed. But there was nothing there for them to attack.

By that point, Elijah had completed his transformation. He flapped his wings, leaving the mass of blood beasts behind. As he did so, he aimed toward the previously-sensed guardian and its natural treasure.

Now that he wasn’t constrained by the environment, he made fantastic time. Elijah knew he probably should have just used Shape of the Sky from the outset, but if he’d done so, he would have missed some very important information. Sometimes, that was more important than covering ground as quickly and as safely as possible.

But there was always a moment to abandon investigation and lean on action. He’d reached that stage.

Over the next twenty or so minutes, Elijah saw more than a hundred clumps of blood beasts. But they paled in comparison to the mass of creatures he saw surrounding a lone island in the middle of the swamp.

Hundreds of thousands of blood beasts had been driven into a frenzy. Most had been caught in a dense blanket of webs, but the greedy creatures simply used their fellows as bridges in their quest to reach their prey.

And what a prey it was.

The guardian was a spider, not unlike the one Elijah had killed so long ago in the pass leading from Ironshore to Norcastle. However, where that had been a monster, entirely out of place, this was an obvious guardian. The creature was at least thirty feet wide, and it pulsed with enough power that Elijah put it at least at the level of the leviathan he’d killed in the seas north of his island.

Behind it were thousands of eggs, all wrapped in cocoon-like webs, which were attached to a massive tree whose boughs stretched for hundreds of feet in every direction. It practically glowed with power, establishing it as a natural treasure at least as powerful as the ancestral trees he’d planted in Argos and Ironshore.

Not on the level of the grove’s ancestral tree, but still more potent than any other treasure Elijah had seen.

And Elijah knew he had no choice but to protect it.