154. Beyond the Sky (IX) (Patreon)

Kaya had been running for so long she didn’t recall when she’d started. Could’ve been a day ago. Maybe two? But she was still brimming with energy, energy leaking out her skin as a pale gold glow. She could run for what felt like forever—until she crossed the horizon, and farther still! And all the while she set upon whatever she found like a hungry vordor, turning insides to outsides and laughing and living free and wild, hair fluttering unleashed in the wind.

At some point it had started to get colder. The air dried out by degrees; at first it felt like a thick, ever-present blanket damply swaddling her. Now it had thinned and dried out. A few hours later still and it was starting to sting at her cheeks, reddening her skin—sharp with a fresh, stiff cold. A few hours more and a light layer of frost layered the ground. The frost thickened as she went, until at last she was pacing along flat sands streaked with crisp lines of snow and ice under a clear, pale-blue sky.

Ooh! She’d found her way to the frozen tundra. Fun!

She found funky new living things here, new creatures for her to smush up which had her feeling all warm and fuzzy. A diet of sandwolves and wyrms had kept her amused, but it had been starting to feel kind of stale. The guts didn’t squelch in quite the same way; and there were only so many flavors of pain one could sample on the face of one species before they all started to taste the same.

Her first new victim was something she’d thought was a mound of ice-rocks until it came suddenly alive and tried to bash her face in. She bashed it in first with one hefty gold punch. Some sort of Technique she’d swallowed up at the Oasis—what was it called? Fist of the… err—Almighty, was it? Whatever it was, it had this cute ability to bypass a creature’s outsides when she hit it—the force would go straight into its insides, smooshing it to mush!

The ice golem shivered once when she struck. Then white lines spread up and down it like cracks on the frozen surface of a lake. It split apart, disintegrating into a fine white powder; it didn’t seem to feel hurt as it went—it sort of just broke and drifted off in the harsh gale. She frowned. Bleh. How dull!

Growling, she went deeper and deeper. She needed blood, fresh blood—oh…Oh! She perked up. She sniffed. There was an intriguing hint on the air. She’d grown a sixth sense for this sort of thing. There was a certain tang to life, a subtle smell that you only really got after you’d gotten knee-deep in the insides of lots of living things. She smelled it now—and it wasn’t just one scent but several. Big hulking things. Things with lots of flesh and fur. She licked her lips. Suddenly she was ravenously hungry. More, more! Off she went, stalking the scent, laughing full-throated as she did.

She stumbled upon them as she rounded an icy dune. She blinked. Woah.

They were like sandwolves but bigger, much more muscular with stark blue eyes and manes which seemed like wreaths made of jagged icicles. Each of them wore coats of sleek white fur, ending at a nub of a tail. There must’ve been a dozen of them, and they were all in the Earth Realm—and deep in it, too! These creatures must’ve been near Sky.

She was only in the Earth Realm!

Their heads swiveled to look at her as one, eyes sharp and shining. They bared snow-white teeth, growls erupting from their throats.

She felt drunk on her own blood; it rushed about her veins in a flood and she felt herself heating up, steaming gold despite the cold. Her heart hammered in her chest; she bared her teeth at them in response, fists clenched, golden qi gushing at her knuckles. Then she dashed in gleefully, freely, and lost herself in the madness.

The thought that maybe she—a fresh Earth-Realm initiate—probably shouldn’t take on a full herd of late Earth-Realm beasts never even flickered across her mind. There was a flurry of blood and snarling and clawing and ripping and tearing, blood spurting and splattering on the sands, sharp gouts of pain, limbs ripping off their joints and through it all her laughter. It seemed to pass through her as a blur of intense sensation; by the time it was over she was hollow. Even the goldlight was gone from her palms.

She stood there, gasping, and glanced around.

A dozen carcasses were strewn across the snow, splayed and broken and oddly twisted. Ahh… that’s it. A warm fuzzy joy flowed over her. The only odd thing about these creatures was that they seemed not to bleed red blood. When she tore them up a bluish-white substance, like half-frozen water, came out from them. Weird! Fun!

But why was the ground about her so red? There was red everywhere! It was like the whole place had been painted over. There wasn’t a beast without a splash of crimson staining its fur.

Then she looked down and blinked again.

Oh! I guess that explains it.

She glanced around again, quite impressed at herself. She didn’t know she even had that much blood in her!

She blinked a third time, slower now. Her eyelids felt strangely heavy. She glanced back down. Why was her skin—the strips that were left, anyways—so blue?

…Hum.

Weird. There appeared to be no qi in her. No blood dripped out of her. There wasn’t even that gold qi anymore—the spot in her soul where it came felt raw to her, overdrawn. She was utterly spent. Her heartbeat was the only sign she lived at all—and even that was so weak she scarcely felt it, and it was slowing fast. Uh….

…

She blacked out. She fell face-first into the snow, and was still.

From high above, a drizzle of sleet began to fall.

***

Dorian tread water—well, lava—at the surface of the volcano, and thought. All the while he his Bloodline sang to him. In this place it seemed at home. It seemed to flow as the lava flowed, swirling with the currents in this boiling molten soup. Some dormant aspect to it seemed to have awakened; the lava, which had once felt on the verge of cooking him, was feeling less and less hot with each second. He was acclimating.

He was struck by the feeling that he’d been here before. It was like the Sinkhole, but with magma instead of water! And if he wished to explore the depths of this thing—like with the Sinkhole—he’d need to dive in deep, relying on senses other than sight. Really none of his senses except his spiritual sense would do him any good here. The lava was simply too thick. Yet as he probed deeper into the volcano he found his Spiritual Sense was so sharpened it may as well have been a set of dull eyes. Some part of this place, the qi of it, its aspect, perhaps, clicked with him, welcomed him.

Made sense. It was his Bloodline’s ancestral home, after all!   He dove in.

At first it was slow going, wading lower and lower. It felt less like swimming than dragging himself through a swamp stride by stride, weaving around passing chunks of stone and tar as he did. The farther he went the hotter it got, the denser the qi—the more it seared his body.

And yet his body seemed to relish the heat. Even he was surprised. As he went deeper and deeper, soaking in more qi and heat, he felt the whole of his physical being vibrating subtly, like water brought to a low boil. Tiny motes of darkness were stripped from his flesh as he went, burned out of him—and qi rushed in, seeping into his muscles and bones and skin.

Hells— it’s body tempering!

It was what every Torchdragon baby must’ve gone through at birth. Made in the most qi-dense, hottest, most pressurized regions of the volcano, its body’s every impurity was burned out from it. Like steel in a furnace it was tempered until the end product was a creature whose physical body by itself was freakish enough to eviscerate most every Beast at its power level.

And now it was happening to him!

The farther he went, the more he felt the boil. A fog he hadn’t known was there was slowly lifting from his mind. His body teemed with new power. With each passing second he felt more and more unbreakable—like under this newfound pressure his body was responding just as a Torchdragon’s!

Wait. When he emerged would his skin be as impenetrable as a Torchdragon scale?! A god could hope, couldn’t he?

He swam deeper, and the qi only got denser, the heat hotter…

Far below he felt a nexus of shockingly dense qi. A whirlpool of furious qi roiled around it—there. He could sense it. He’d gone a third of the way down now. No encounters. It was almost concerning—he would’ve expected something to greet him by now. Or could it be that that Nine-Headed Phoenix was really the only thing living in here?

His gut said otherwise. This qi dense a place, and no monsters? He’d seen Hellspawn outside the volcano. Clearly there were such critters about—but he sensed none thus far… It was off.

Still he kept swimming, albeit a little more cautiously, stretching his senses to their limits—making sure to probe the very boundaries of the volcano for hidden life-forms as he passed.

The nexus drew nearer…