Path of Dragons

“That’s the biggest damn ingot I’ve ever seen,” Kurik said. He tore his eyes away from the bar of celestial gold and asked, “Can I touch it? Just once, so I can tell my clan I actually laid a finger on a bar of celestial gold.”

“Of course you can touch it,” Sadie said. “You earned it, just like the rest of us. By rights, it’s as much yours as it is ours.”

“Not me,” Dat said. “I already got mine, bro.”

“That’s not how it works, Dat,” Elijah said. “Just because you got something already doesn’t mean we’ll eliminate you from getting another reward. This is all about who gets the most benefit out of it. And that’s obviously Sadie, right?”

“What? Why me?” she asked.

“I’ll damn well take it if you’re gonna argue ‘bout it,” Kurik said, his tone leaving no question that he was serious. “That bar right there would be enough to set me up for a coupla decades. I could buy more cultivation potions than I knew what to do with.”

“Is that the right play?” Sadie asked. “We could sell it, then split the –”

“Look at your armor,” Elijah said.

“What?”

Elijah rolled his eyes. “It’s barely holding together,” he said. “I know it’s got some kind of self-repair function, right? But it looks like each time it has to do that still weakens it. I’d be willing to bet that it’s on the verge of losing its power. I don’t know how item degradation works, but I can guarantee that it’s not working as well as it used to. Even from when we first met to now, it’s been seriously weakened.”

“But –”

“He’s right, bro. You can use it more than we can.”

Sadie looked away, then said, “I don’t like it.”

“We should do a vote,” Elijah said. “All in favor of Sadie getting the celestial gold so she can have some armor made?”

Everyone agreed.

“Well, that settles it,” he said. “It’s all yours. And I have something that’ll make it even better.”

“Getting a priceless ingot isn’t enough?” she asked, a little surly. Elijah had never seen anyone so adamant that they didn’t deserve a reward, but from what he knew of Sadie, it made sense. She had a lot of flaws, but selfishness certainly wasn’t one of them. That was something he admired about her, even if it was frustrating to deal with at times.

“You know my sister-in-law is one of the highest-level Blacksmiths in the world, right?”

“And you’re comfortable volunteering her for this?”

“If I know Carmen, she’d kill me if I didn’t,” Elijah said. “That’s how crafters work, right? They get more experience for working with rare materials and creating powerful items. Letting Carmen work with this would benefit her almost as much as it would help you. I guarantee she’d jump at the chance to do this.”

“I insist on paying.”

At that, Elijah laughed.

“What?” Sadie asked.

“I wasn’t saying she’d do it for free,” he said between chuckles. “You’re going to pay through the nose for it.”

“Oh.”

“I’ve always wondered where that phrase comes from,” said Dat, a pensive look on his face.

“What?”

“Pay through the nose, bro. It’s weird.”

“It is,” Kurik agreed.

Ron, who’d so far been silent, said, “It’s derived from a policy surrounding a Danish poll tax imposed on the Irish in the ninth century. When someone failed to pay, they would slit that person’s nose. Therefore, they paid their tax through the nose.”

“Seriously? That’s gruesome.”

“You humans are crazier than a tall gnome,” Kurik said. “S’pose it ain’t any better than my people, though. If someone didn’t pay their taxes, they were thrown in the pit.”

“The pit?”

“Of lava.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. It was s’posed to be an opportunity. You know, for cultivation and such. Make ‘em useful to society and whatnot. But most times, it was just a roundabout way of executin’ somebody. If they had any cultivation to speak of, they wouldn’t have failed to pay their taxes.”

“Brutal.”

Kurik shrugged. “Clan can’t support everybody.”

“I think we’ve gotten a little off track here,” Sadie said. “I’ll take the bar of gold, but in doing so, I remove myself from consideration for any of the other rewards, at least until everyone else gets something.” Elijah opened his mouth to offer a counterargument, but Sadie spoke over him. “That’s the deal, Elijah.”

“I think it’s insane that you’re making a deal to get less stuff, but whatever. So long as you take the ingot, I’m fine,” Elijah said.

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After that, Sadie shoved the bar of gold into her spatial pack. It was at least two feet long and half as wide, so the ingot weighed more than a thousand pounds. How much more, Elijah wasn’t sure, but he knew it was significantly heavier than a normal gold bar would have been. Whatever the case, neither Sadie nor Elijah had any trouble lifting it, but the others, all of which had much lower Strength, struggled.

So, maybe it was even heavier than Elijah thought.

Regardless, once that was taken care of, everyone settled in to recover from the fight. It took the better part of a day before they were ready to move, but before they left the Citadel of Innovation, Elijah wanted to ensure that they weren’t leaving anything behind.

“There’s probably more of them power crystals around, too,” Kurik said. The dwarf already had a nice collection of them, including the large one that seemed to power the whole horde of robots, but he claimed that having more of them would take his traps to the next level. He even talked about building siege weapons. So, as Kurik searched the compound for crystals, everyone else looked for other useful items or materials.

It wasn’t very successful. Elijah found a lockbox that, when they managed to pry it open, revealed a collection of silver and gold ethereum, but there wasn’t much else that the group didn’t immediately classify as junk. Still, it took another two days for them to scour the whole facility, so by the time they were finished, they were all eager to leave it behind.

It took almost a week to exit the enormous junkyard, and though they kept their guard up, they encountered no other threats. Benedict was nowhere to be seen, suggesting that he very much didn’t want to be found. That left Elijah feeling a little regretful, but he couldn’t do anything about the situation. Even so, he resolved to talk it out with the man if they ran into one another in the future.

After leaving the trash heap behind, they once again found themselves in the jungle. The first wraith attack was almost comforting after spending so long traveling among the mountains of garbage. It had been bad enough when every step came with the possibility of an attack from the horde of robotic insects, but without them, it was somehow worse. A stillness had laid over the entire area, and it left everyone feeling extremely uncomfortable. Leaving that behind came with a nearly tangible sense of relief.

“Where are you going, bro?” asked Dat, poking the campfire with a stick. After a long day of travel, the others were already asleep in their tents, but Dat had been given the first watch. Elijah, meanwhile, was restless.

“Last time I climbed one of the trees, I saw a pyramid over that way,” he said, pointing to the east. “I want to go check it out.”

“Why?”

Elijah shrugged. “Call it a sense of adventure,” he said. That was part of it, but he also felt that the more he knew about the excised world – and how it had come to its state – the better he and the others would fare during the challenges. So far, it hadn’t really mattered, but his intuition told him that some level of understanding would eventually become necessary.

Or maybe that was just an excuse to indulge his inner Indiana Jones.

Regardless, after telling Dat that he would return before dawn, he set off into the jungle, shifting into the Shape of Venom along the way. Thankfully, the evolution had done nothing to interfere with Guise of the Unseen, and with the influx of Dexterity and Strength, the ease with which he traveled was unprecedented. In addition, he’d discovered that he could easily stick to just about any surface. On Earth, lizards like geckos used tiny hairs called setae to accomplish that feat, and he expected that if he investigated it, he would find that something similar was responsible for his own ability.

He'd also found that his venom was incredibly potent. Using only Envenom, he’d taken down a beast the size of a rhinoceros only the day before, and it had taken less than a minute for the creature to keel over. He could have done it more quickly before – ripping out its throat or crushing the base of its skull only took seconds – but Elijah was still impressed by the strength of the venom.

More experimentation told him that Predator Strike did indeed increase the potency of Envenom, which made the already-powerful toxin even deadlier. Overall, he was impressed with the increased lethality of his evolved form.

He’d also used a mirror he kept in his Ghoul-Hide Satchel to inspect the visual differences. The form was mostly bright green, with yellow streaks along the torso and slashing just under the eyes. It was also far more serpentine, almost like a salamander, though with a head shape that definitely resembled a viper’s. Thankfully, the new form had retained the previous one’s color-changing ability to blend into its environment.

In all, Elijah was pleased with the evolved shape, though he did take the time to wonder what form the other variants would have taken. Whatever the case, in most ways that mattered, the evolution was a vast upgrade, though he did think he’d miss the frighteningly powerful jaws that had accompanied the draconid form. The blight dragon was no slouch in that department, but Elijah didn’t think he’d be using it to crush skulls anytime soon.

Which meant that he would need to learn new tactics if he wanted to get the most out of his new abilities.

All of that played through his mind as he made his way to the pyramid he’d seen from afar. From miles away, he’d only seen a few details, but he knew it was abandoned and overgrown. Without Eyes of the Eagle, he probably would have mistaken it for another hill.

After a little more than an hour, he stumbled upon the outskirts of what he suspected had once been a small settlement. Other than the foundations, there wasn’t much left, and even those had been covered by dirt, debris, and vegetation. Still, there were a few crumbling walls that still stood, though they were under assault from the steadily growing vines that were so ubiquitous in the jungle. In a few years, those creeping tendrils would collapse the walls entirely, and a few years after that, there would be nothing left of the settlement.

That made Elijah wonder just how much history was buried beneath the soil. The civilization that called the excised world home had clearly been quite advanced. Maybe not in a technological sense, but at least in terms of its place within the rest of the multi-verse. And now, there was so little left.

A wave of regret flashed through Elijah’s mind. He wasn’t responsible for anything that had happened to the natives. He knew that. But he still regretted that he’d never seen them in their prime. It also brought to mind the state of Earth’s once-mighty civilization. Elijah had only seen a tiny fraction of the expanded planet, but he’d traveled through the remnants of the old world enough to recognize that it wouldn’t be long before whole swaths of the planet looked no different than the excised Trial world.

Most people might’ve found the setting a bit frightening. Even during the day, very little light penetrated the jungle’s canopy, and it became particularly dark at night. However, for Elijah, who had the benefit of One with Nature, the darkness wasn’t particularly onerous. Indeed, the shifting shadows instilled the area with a forlorn beauty that spoke of great loss.

Eventually, he reached the pyramid, and even though he’d seen it from afar, he was still impressed by its construction. Even after what looked like millennia of neglect, it still stood tall and proud. Certainly, the huge stones that had been used in its construction were covered in moss and vines, but the structure didn’t look like it was in any danger of collapse.

Perhaps there was a lesson there, Elijah thought. Even amidst so much decay, some aspects of a dying civilization would remain.

Elijah only had to search for a few minutes before he found an entrance. It was overgrown with vines, which formed a concealing curtain, but he could feel the open space beyond. So, it was with some excitement that he stepped inside.

And he was not disappointed by the sight.

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