Path of Dragons

Elijah hacked at the block of wood, careful to hit it just right. Over the last couple of months, he’d had plenty of practice, but even so, losing concentration would be disastrous for the results. He spared a glance for the pile of firewood propped against one corner of his shelter and reconsidered that word. Disastrous.

For weeks after washing ashore, every action had been one of life and death. When he’d killed his first crab, when he’d made his first tools, and, finally, when he’d caught his first fish – the stakes had been incredibly high. But now? He had a stock of smoked fish, a horde of berries, and a store of mushrooms. Food wouldn’t be an issue any time soon; in fact, he felt confident that his cache would last him through most of the winter, and if he continued to gather food, he wouldn’t even need to ration.

He looked down at his crude axe. The blade was made of chipped flint, sharpened and refined over the course of a week. It wasn’t his first such tool – they had a habit of cracking if he used them too roughly – and he was certain it wouldn’t be his last. The same went for his stone knife and spear, the latter of which had yet to even see use. Regardless, he could always make more. He’d found a nice vein of the stuff in a nearby cliff, so he wouldn’t soon lack for material.

Elijah sighed, flexing his shoulders. Over the past six weeks, he’d made incredible progress regarding his overall physical condition. Some of that was due to his usage of Touch of Nature that reduced his recovery times to mere minutes, rather than days. But he also felt confident that his Body of Wood had played a part as well. When he turned his mind inward, Elijah got the feeling that his body wanted – or needed, perhaps – to be stronger. Whatever the case, the result was explosive muscle growth that had left him nearly as strong as he’d been before his cancer diagnosis.

It was a good thing, too, because there was no way his weakened body could have survived for more than a couple of weeks. Getting stronger and healthier hadn’t been a mere desire; it had been a necessity for survival. And Elijah had thrown himself into it accordingly. The results spoke for themselves.

Elijah didn’t have access to a mirror, but from what he could see of his arms, legs, and torso, his entire body was lean and corded with compact muscle. He’d never look like a bodybuilder; wilderness survival didn’t lend itself to packing on mass. But he did look – and more importantly, feel – healthier than he had in recent memory.

More importantly, Elijah’s constant fishing and crab hunting had had another side effect. Each kill had netted him an accumulation of foreign Ethera. With the fish, it was barely noticeable. A thimbleful compared to the crabs’ cup. But he’d killed a lot of fish, and the pool of Ethera had slowly grown until Elijah felt as if he was going to burst. Soon – maybe the next time he went fishing – he was certain that he would gain a level. And with that, according to one of the notifications he'd seen after having the druid archetype thrust upon him, he’d get another two points to improve his stats.

He couldn’t wait because he already knew where those points were going to go. First, though, he needed to finish his daily chores – chopping firewood and gathering water – before he could go fishing.

An unrelated shiver ran up his spine. In the past, he would have panicked. But over the weeks, he’d grown used to his stalker. If it really wanted to kill him, it would have done so already. With each passing day, Elijah had grown stronger and gotten better equipped. His axe and spear weren’t ideal weapons, and he was certain that they wouldn’t give him the edge he needed to survive an encounter with the still unseen feline predator. However, he was confident that he could at least wound it. Perhaps the creature knew that as well.

Or maybe he was just anthropomorphizing it by attributing human intelligence and reasoning ability to an animal.

Either way, if the cat – and he was fairly certain that’s what it was – wanted to kill him, it had already had plenty of opportunities to do so, and with less risk than he now presented. Besides, he had an agreement with the creature. Sort of.

Slipping his axe’s haft through his belt of twined dogbane fibers, Elijah grabbed the fruit of his day’s labor and piled it into a neat stack inside his shelter. The cabin had undergone almost as drastic a transformation as his body, and he’d used a series of logs from trees he’d cut down, branches, and moss to enclose the space. At the time, it hadn’t been wholly necessary, but with every passing week, he drew closer to winter. That, in turn, meant that he needed a much sturdier home to stave off the incoming weather. It also served as rudimentary protection from any wildlife that might come sniffing around. It had been the work of a rough couple of weeks, but he’d finally gotten it to a passable, if not completely comfortable, state.

With his firewood put away, Elijah sat on the stump he’d dragged inside the shelter and let out a sigh. For a moment, he just sat there, gathering his thoughts. That was one of the issues with living a solitary life. Often, he’d lose himself in his inner thoughts, and he wouldn’t even realize that he’d been staring off into space for some indeterminate amount of time. Usually, his thoughts weren’t elaborate. Instead, they were mostly comprised of half-forgotten memories from the distant past.

Ultimately, that was a good thing. He’d had a good childhood with loving parents who would have done anything they could to support him. Certainly, they’d passed away before their time, which was anything but pleasant, but he’d long chosen to focus on the good times they’d shared rather than the devastating loss of their passing.

So, as he sat there, he found his mind drifting back to when his father had taught him the rudiments of boxing, to when his mother would take him out into the woods where she helped him to identify various wild edibles. Or when the entire family would visit the farmer’s market. Little things, all, but they were enough to keep his spirits up.

Idly, he found himself wondering how his sister was coping. What was life like in the cities? She didn’t live within Seattle’s city limits, but it was close enough that she wouldn’t have escaped the problems that came with a metropolitan area. The world had irrevocably changed. There was magic now. If what had happened to the plane was any indication, modern technology had probably failed. He’d lost his phone in the crash, but he suspected that even if it had survived, it would’ve been rendered into nothing but a useless brick. Likely, everything else was the same.

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Elijah wasn’t so naïve as to think that humanity would react well to the changes. He’d seen people turn into savages after more mundane natural disasters, so it stood to reason that, with survival on the line, people would head down an even less civilized route. Of course, there were plenty of people who would support their neighbors and friends. Good people always outweighed the bad, in his experience. However, he also knew it only took a few people willing to enforce their will on others to enslave a much larger population. Human history was evidence of that.

He shook his head. Down that line of thinking was nothing but despair, which was a very real threat in his situation. Elijah needed to keep his spirits up, lest the isolation and brutal environment be allowed to replace it with despondency. If that happened, he’d soon surrender to depression and wither away. And he refused to let that happen.

The best cure for that kind of thing was to keep busy. To create manageable goals. To take the wins he could get. So, he ran his hand through his lengthening hair, closed his eyes, and took a deep, centering breath before climbing to his feet. He pushed his makeshift door – which was made of sticks that had been bound together with his homemade cordage – aside and ducked outside the shelter. His main fire burned merrily in its pit, reminding Elijah of his half-finished project. He glanced toward the back of the cabin, where he’d been building a fireplace with stones and clay he’d harvested from the stream. It was arduous work, which meant he’d limited his efforts to only working on it a bit each day, but it was coming along. Hopefully, he would finish it by the onset of winter.

Flexing his shoulders, Elijah dragged Ethera from his core and sent a pulse of Touch of Nature through his body. When he’d initially used the spell, he’d done so with very focused intent, which was perfect for healing wounds. However, over the past month-and-a-half, he’d discovered that he could use it without intentional direction. When he did, the Ethera of the spell spread throughout his entire body, healing the minute tears in his muscle fibers that came from exertion, curing his fatigue and hastening his recovery by a large degree.

Usually, it took a couple of pulses, but that wasn’t a big deal. He had Ethera to spare, considering he only had the one spell. Hopefully, that would soon change, but he really couldn’t be sure when he’d get another spell.

Grabbing his spear, a coil of line, and a wooden container he’d carved from a piece of stump, Elijah set off toward his fishing spot. He took a circuitous route, heading toward the snare lines he’d laid; they had yet to be successful, but he hoped they’d soon bear fruit in the form of small woodland creatures he could eat. Thankfully, the hares and squirrels hadn’t been transformed like the crabs. Otherwise, he’d be in real trouble.

He checked his snare lines, but he’d once again failed to catch any prey. However, he did find a stand of mushrooms that he could add to his stash back at the cabin. He slipped each morsel into a satchel he’d crafted from woven grass and lined with his shirt. Soon, he’d have to find some sort of replacement clothing, or he’d die from exposure. At least the weather hadn’t really turned yet, even if Elijah knew it was coming.

Slowly, he made his way to what he referred to as his fishing hole. Nestled on the shore almost a mile from where he’d battled the crabs, it was characterized by a deep pool almost thirty yards across which connected to the sea by a narrow channel. The best spot from which to cast his line lay atop a large boulder that he wouldn’t have been able to climb without his recent physical gains. Now, though, so long as he was careful, it wasn’t difficult, and he soon found himself threading his homemade hook with his similarly handmade line. Once that was done, he baited the hook with a piece of rancid crab, then tossed it into the water.

Once it had settled, he wove the line around his arm, from elbow to palm, then started to gradually pull it in. The first cast was unsuccessful. So was the second. But on the third, he got a bite. However, when he pulled it in, he saw that the fish had only taken the bait. That was the problem with his hooks – well, one of them, at least. They only managed to do their job about half the time.

But Elijah was persistent, and on the tenth cast, he finally pulled in a fish. Like most of the other fish he’d caught over the past six weeks, it appeared to be a steelhead trout. However, it had clearly been mutated just like the crabs had been. Its fins were larger, its body sleeker, and its teeth much more prominent. But fortunately, this mutated variant still tasted the same as every other trout Elijah had ever eaten. More importantly, despite looking like it would be a fearsome predator in the water, it had the same weakness that afflicted almost every other marine animal – it couldn’t breathe outside of the water.

Elijah pulled it on top of the boulder, but he gave it a wide berth as it flopped around. He’d have preferred to end its suffering with a swift strike from his axe, but when he’d tried that with the first fish he’d caught, it had ended with the thing flopping around at the wrong time and latching onto his forearm. Without Touch of Nature, he’d have quickly bled out from that wound, so he’d decided to simply let the fish suffocate from now on.

Still, it wasn’t a pleasant thing to watch, even if he knew it was necessary. He’d never been particularly averse to hunting or fishing, but watching an animal suffer was something wholly different. Even so, he forced himself to watch. Part of that was practical – he wanted to be alert in case the fish got close to the edge; he couldn’t afford to lose it, and he would throw caution to the wind to avoid that eventuality. But the other reason he made himself watch was because he wanted to be aware of the cost of his own survival.

Elijah had long since come to terms with hunting and consuming other animals. Back in the civilized world before the System descended and changed everything, it was possible to avoid eating meat. And for the past few years, he had – mostly. But there was a marked difference between eating meat because you liked it and doing so because you needed the protein and fat if you wanted to survive.

That shift in his mindset had given Elijah some insight into the natural order. Animals didn’t care about the morality of killing another animal for food. They just did what they had to do. In that way, nature was brutal. However, most animals shied away from wanton killing as well. For them, there were no trophies. Just a meal and another day of survival. Elijah had gradually adopted that mindset as his own.

When the fish died, he felt an influx of foreign Ethera flow from the trout and into his mind, where it spread through the branching conduits of his soul and, finally, into his core, where he felt something shift. He gasped at the resulting flash of power, and when it settled, he didn’t need to see the notification to know that he’d reached level two.

Elijah let out a sigh of relief. Now, it was time to see what benefits a level brought with it.

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