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

The tree could not survive alone.

Not yet.

Without Elijah’s constant infusion of vitality – born on the shoulders of his Mantle of Authority and Blessing of the Grove while being guided by Nature’s Design – it would eventually wilt. It simply wasn’t equipped for self-sufficiency.

Knowing the seedling was at such a delicate point, Elijah refused to abandon it. So, he remained in place, the bulk of his mind wrapping the nascent tree in his protective embrace. Gradually, days passed. Then weeks. Finally, after more than a month, he saw them coming.

A horde of monsters, big and small, charged across the Abyssal Moat, trampling the plants he’d so arduously ushered to life. He sprang to his feet, already transforming. His body lengthened as he dropped to all fours. Wings like the branches of an ancient oak sprouted from his back while his neck slithered out from his bulky shoulders. In moments, he’d returned to what increasingly felt like his natural form.

He let out a roar – not of warning, but of pure anger – but he did not charge. Instead, he cast a spell. At first, Eternal Plague only conjured a few dozen blue-winged flies, but with every passing instant, more came. Elijah didn’t bother compounding the spell, largely because that would increase the cost by a significant degree. Instead, he cast it naturally, banking on sustainability rather than an overwhelming burst.

It took the monsters a few more seconds to cross the Abyssal Moat, and when they reached the inner edge, they set to attacking the trilithons ringing Druhmor. The creatures native to the excised world were driven almost entirely by hunger, but even they were intelligent enough to recognize the danger of leaving the rings intact. As such, in the interest of survival, they chose to attack the outer ring.

Thankfully, Elijah had expected as much, so he’d built the trilithons from enormous stones that weighed hundreds of tons each. Altogether, the trilithons were more than a hundred feet tall, with roots descending at least as deep. Moving them had strained even Elijah’s strength. So, when the monsters attacked, they found themselves pounding against what amounted to a fortress wall.

And even without crossing that line, they were subjected to a lesser form of restriction. The moat already drained much of the corruption from the air, so for the monsters, crossing it was akin to him subjecting himself to ethera deprivation. He could survive it – just as they could survive crossing the moat – but it was neither easy nor pleasant.

Add the restrictive runoff from the trilithon circle to the mix, and they failed to express even a fraction of their normal power.

Still, they were dangerous, if only because there were so many.

The building swarm of conjured flies swept out from the inner circles, filling Druhmor a little more with every passing moment. Meanwhile, Elijah abandoned the seedling and raced across the garden he had spent so long creating. Even as a hundred-foot-long dragon, he never trampled a single plant. Not because he possessed a locus. Druhmor was not subject to his domain. Rather, he knew the area so well because he’d spent every waking moment of the past few years tending to it.

Still, it was no short distance to the outer ring. A hundred-and-three miles, to be precise. So, even when he even when he took the sky – staying within a few dozen feet of the ground – it took him almost thirty minutes to reach his destination.

By that point, two things were clear.

The first was that his outer ring was even more durable than he could have imagined. Despite the constant attack – and from huge monsters the size of behemoths – it remained steadfast and undamaged. It wouldn’t last forever, but it would remain intact for the foreseeable future.

The second was that the maximum payload of Eternal Plague had increased significantly, proving that his spells were at least partially dependent on his cultivation. It made him look forward to when he finally advanced the other two aspects.

In any case, the air was absolutely full of swarming flies that, when he reached the outer ring, surged forward and enveloped the rush of monsters.

There were thousands of the creatures, too. The horde reminded Elijah of the worldseed he’d absorbed during the Broken Crown. The energy it emitted had created a mindless hunger among the denizens of that Primal Realm.

This situation was similar.

A good thing, too, because they paid almost no attention to the swarm of biting flies. Elijah glided in place, circling like a vulture as his spell slowly infected the monsters. The smaller and weaker among them soon succumbed, only to be trampled by the others. The larger creatures were far more durable, so it was hours before they started to stumble.

But eventually, they fell too.

All but a scant few of the most powerful, and even they were affected. Their weak blows continued to hammer at the trilithon ring, but to no avail. Elijah finally swept in, adding Nature’s Claim to the mix as well.

He slaughtered them.

Not quickly. And certainly not easily. The creatures were at the level of demi-gods, and even as weakened as they were, they still put up a good fight.

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But by now, Elijah was well accustomed to killing monsters. He’d long since lost count of how many he’d slain. Thousands had fallen before him, and that was even before he’d reached Druhmor. Using the baited monsters as fuel had sent that number skyrocketing into the tens of thousands.

And yet, there were always more.

To some degree, it reminded him of the Chimeric Forge. Some of the characteristics were similar. Monsters were monsters, after all. However, where the creatures he’d fought in that Primal Realm were at least vaguely plausible, the ones that existed on the excised planet were so wrong that they should never have existed. So, while Elijah felt the instinctive imperative to exterminate both, he couldn’t deny that the drive to kill abyssals was much, much stronger.

It would have been extremely easy to lose himself in that hatred, to set off across the world and leav a path of dead monsters in his wake. A lot simpler than trying to build an oasis in the middle of the abyss, too. And yet, Elijah had so far resisted that urge. He kept his goals at the front of his mind, guiding him forward every step of the way.

However, in the middle of the latest battle – or extermination, as it turned out – he briefly let his instincts take over. For a while, he didn’t think. He wasn’t worried about maintaining balance or the flow of vitality to his creations. He didn’t consider the mountain of responsibility he’d taken upon his shoulders. Nor did he allow himself to worry about what he would do if his current plan didn’t work.

He just killed.

And in that slaughter came a measure of freedom. It was an illusion, though. Just as the abyssals’ hunger imprisoned them, so too did his instinctive hatred of those selfsame monsters keep him captive within the bounds of his own nature. Giving in to it was an illusion, and it constituted confinement of a different sort.

Elijah managed to regain control just as he tore through the final monster. He stood there, blood, pus, and other unidentifiable fluids glistening on his emerald scales. Glittering flies suffused the atmosphere so fully that the cloud of their presence blotted out the entire sky.

Smells, both foreign and familiar, tickled Elijah’s nose and turned his stomach. Yet, he did not succumb.

Idly, he wondered if he’d ever smell anything truly pleasant again. Even the aroma of nature that existed within his comparatively tiny oasis came with the undertone of something foul. Perhaps it was just his imagination. An echo of a remembered odor that he could not escape so long as he remained trapped in the abyss.

With a sigh, he began to gather the corpses before toting them to a nearby pit he’d built early on. After tossing them inside, he spread his mantle to its fullest extent, cleansing the carcasses. Corruption sizzled under his influence, then began to dissipate. Some of it manifested as black liquid oozing out of every pore. Some dissipated into the air.

Elijah paid little attention to the form.

Nor did he take the time to ensure that the puddled goop remained separate from the meat. If he’d intended to consume it himself, he would have taken much more care, but considering this batch of monsters was meant to be fertilizer, he paid far less attention to such things.

The remnants of corruption wouldn’t last after entering the rings, anyway.

Even subjected to the power of his mantle, the carcasses weren’t quick to cleanse. It took a few hours for each batch, and the pit could only hold so much at any given time. The sheer number of monster corpses meant that Elijah was forced to cleanse dozens of batches before he finished the task.

Between each group, he returned to the seedling and funneled huge torrents of ethera and vitality toward its growth. Most of that effort would be lost when he left, but so long as he maintained an equilibrium, he was fine.

When he finished cleansing the monster corpses, he set about ripping everything into manageable pieces. Then, he deposited those pieces in the soil across Druhmor, where they quickly began to rot. Hopefully, they would help to foster a nutrient rich ecosystem in which the plants could thrive.

Over the years, he’d covered most of Druhmor – or at least the most important parts – and now, he was just filling in. But he wouldn’t let such good fuel go to waste. After all, the monsters were all powerful, and as such, their meat was extremely rich in terms of ethera and vitality. He would have been a fool not to use it.

That process took a couple of weeks of backbreaking labor before he returned to nurturing the seedling full-time.

The next attack came from below.

Tendrils of nearly pure corruption slithered through the soil, sapping vitality from the surroundings. To counter that, Elijah strangled them with Throne of Spores. The attack was insidious, and if Elijah hadn’t been paying such close attention, it might have been successful.

So too would it have been a problem if the surface-dwelling monsters attacked in tandem with those that lurked below. Thankfully, the creatures were as close to mindless as they could be. They were driven by pure, instinctual hunger, and as such, they were incapable of concocting strategies for success.

In fact, they were more likely to fight one another than to work together.

Such was the problem with the abyss. Each of those monsters had power, but their lack of forward thinking, their hungering instinct, and insistence on remaining solitary reduced their threat profile by a significant margin.

But if they ever started working together, Elijah knew his project would die in its infancy.

Finally, when the shoot had grown a little more six inches out of the ground, Elijah decided that the time had come to enact the next phase of his plan. With that in mind, he retrieved the crystalline broken shard of the World Tree branch from his Arcane Loop.

For a moment, he simply looked at it. He studied it. He cast his senses within, and he was rewarded with the faintest of echoes. Some miniscule sliver of the World Tree remained within. A piece of its soul. Perhaps it was inactive. Maybe that would never change.

But Elijah hoped for something different. He was banking on that faint connection. Or failing that, he wanted to harness the seemingly infinite well of power he felt within that six-inch sliver of crystal.

It felt so different from other energy, though. Ethera was in there. So was vitality. But there was something else as well. In fact, the majority of that pool was unidentifiable – at least by Elijah. He chose to think of it as an echo of the World Tree’s spirit.

Whatever it truly was, it comforted Elijah. It was overwhelming as well, but even letting himself sense it felt like standing in an open field during a warm summer rain. Elijah’s instincts told him to trust it.

To use it.

And if possible, to guide it.

After only a few moments, Elijah pushed the crystal forward and set it inside a cradle made of a couple of sticks he’d harvested from nearby bushes. It held it directly above the seedling’s shoot. Once it was in place, Elijah closed his eyes and, again, embraced Nature’s Design.

He’d learned the method from Nerthus, when the spryggent had incorporated the Shard of Nature’s Might – a Primal Realm reward – into a tree grown from one of the ancestral tree seeds. That had become one of Elijah’s now-destroyed staves.

This time, Elijah’s intentions were far grander in scope.

But if he wanted it to work, he needed to remain constantly vigilant. And of course, he needed time. Lots and lots of time.