Path of Dragons 4 - Chapter 82 - Path of Dragons (Patreon)

Elijah lay on the cold floor, overcome with emotion as the memory of what he’d just seen – of what he had just experienced – engulfed his thoughts. 

“It truly is overwhelming, is it not?” came a voice from above.  Elijah recognized it as coming from his patron – the beautiful woman who’d greeted him before he’d been thrust into another life.  “I sill remember when I saw it.  Tens of thousands of years, and that memory is still as fresh as it was when I was a hatchling.”

Her voice was wistful.  Motherly.  Comforting in a way Elijah couldn’t quite articulate.  After a moment, he felt her standing over him.  Heat radiated from her body, far hotter than a person should be.  Finally, he looked up to see her smiling face, and he reveled in her approval.  In that instant, Elijah wanted nothing more than to please the dragon woman. 

That feeling passed quickly, but the echoes remained long after, influencing his thoughts like nothing else could. 

“Arise.  We haven’t much time.”

Elijah pushed himself to all fours, then rose to his feet.  Glancing down, he realized that he looked the same as he had before being pushed into that memory.  The same could be said of the dragon woman that was his patron, though even if nothing had changed about her appearance, to Elijah, she looked even more striking than ever before.  It was as if, until that very moment, he’d never seen true beauty, and now that he had, nothing else could compare.  He wanted to drop to his knees and worship her like that goddess she clearly was.

And he didn’t like that one bit.

“Stop doing that,” he muttered.

“What?” she asked innocently.

“Whatever you’re doing to my mind,” he answered.  “I don’t like it.  So, stop.”  Belatedly, he added, “Please.”

That brought a studious gaze followed by a tinkling laugh.  A second later, the enchantment of her presence faded.  After it did, Elijah could still tell that she was gorgeous, and in a way that defied the notion of imperfection.  However, it was a distant thing.  Alien in its flawlessness.  He’d once thought the same about elves, but in comparison, they were warm and approachable. 

“Most whelps have difficulty seeing through my Presence,” she said with another smile.  “I am pleased that you managed it.  I knew you were special the moment you completed the quest and saved my daughter.”

“Sara?  Wait…you’re…”

Elijah was loathe to admit it, but he’d actually forgotten the name of the dragon who’d given him the quest that had changed his life.   Saraalinisa was far more memorable in his mind, largely because he’d actually met her.  By contrast, her mother who’d given Elijah the quest was just a line on a notification. 

“I am Kirlissa, third elder of the Golden Flight,” she announced.  “And your patron.”

“I don’t understand what’s going on.  Why am I here?” Elijah asked. 

“You are not here, strictly speaking,” she explained.  “Your spirit is.  Each step you take on the Path of Dragons will be progressively more physical.  In addition, you will gain more control over the memories until, in the end, you will write the story yourself.”

Elijah nodded, though he wasn’t entirely sure what she meant, save that he was having some sort of out-of-body experience.  “Was this a test, then?”

“In a sense,” she answered.  “It is also necessary for each dragon to understand our history.  Without the context of our origin, dragons tend to grow…arrogant.  When I feel myself becoming overbearing, I remember that my race began with a simple fire salamander.”

“I see,” Eliijah lied. 

“No.  You do not.  But you are no true dragon – not yet – so your lack of perspective is forgivable,” she said, her smile widening slightly.  It was the sort of expression a mother would bestow upon a troublesome child who’d somehow managed to make her proud.  It made Elijah want to squirm away.

“How did the salamander do it?” he asked.  He suspected the dragon wouldn’t reveal much more about his circumstances, so he chose to move on to the purpose of the entire vision.  “I felt her falling apart after using that fire-breathing ability.  She shouldn’t have made it to the top of the lotus.  And when she got there, she just laid an egg and died?  How was it fertilized?  How did the baby dragon survive?”

“So many questions,” Kirlissa said.  “The answer to most is that we do not know.  The Mother of Dragons was an enigmatic creature, and the Dream was pieced together from thousands of scattered sources.  We have no insight into why she sought the Fire Lotus.  Nor do we know how the egg was fertilized.  The First Dragon’s path is lost to time.  The only thing we know for certain is that it survived and thrived, and our race was born.  Some of our most talented Scholars suppose that the egg was fertilized by the Fire Lotus itself, giving birth to a creature of mingled magic and flesh, though other factions refute that claim.  Wars have been fought over the details.”

Elijah could understand that.  On Earth, people killed one another over religion all the time, and the origin of dragons seemed like the same sort of thing.  So, Elijah decided to push his curiosity aside and focus on what really mattered. 

“What will happen next?” he asked, glancing around at his surroundings.  He stood in the center of a grand hall that was lined with white marble pillars capped with gold.  In the distance, he saw a massive throne that stood before an even larger pile of treasure.  Elijah could feel ethera wafting from the collected mass of gold ethereum, and he even saw quite a few coins that were probably platinum. 

It was the dragon’s hoard.

“In a moment, you will return to your body and complete your cultivation.  Most of it is finished, but you still need to push your core to the next stage,” she explained.  “It will be painful, but if you could endure the Origin of Dragons, you are more than capable of withstanding the transition from the first stage to the second.”

“And after that?” he asked. “Am I going to grow scales or something?”

She laughed again.  “No,” she answered.  “Not unless you wish to, and not until much later in the cultivation process.  You have taken the first step on the Path of Dragons, but you have a long way to go before you can truly call yourself one of us.  That is how it is with dragonkin like yourself.”

Her face turned serious. “I will warn you now.  There are those in the Empire of Scale who will treat you as lesser because you are not a natural dragon.  These…people are wrong.  If you reach the right stage of cultivation, you will be as much a dragon as anyone in the empire,” she explained.  “Perhaps more so.  Until then, you will need to remain on guard for those who would look down on you for your humble origins.”

Elijah sighed.  “Dragon racism,” he muttered.  “Great.”

“Do not worry yourself.  You will not soon reach the empire, and by the time you do, I will have prepared the way,” she said.  “You did not hatch from one of my eggs, but you are still one of my children.  And I will brook no disrespect against my family.  My protection will only go so far, though.  You must learn to fly on your own merit.”

“I will,” Elijah said.  And he meant it, too.  He would take any help he was offered, but he’d been on his own for long enough that he was more than comfortable with that. 

“I believe you,” said Kirlissa, reaching out to stroke his cheek.  Her touch felt like being hit my a tiny bolt of lightning.  “I am forbidden from giving too much information concerning what is coming.  Even I am subordinate to the system.  However, I will offer you this advice. Do not underestimate the benefits of conquering Primal Realms.  The fate of your world will depend on it.”

“How –”

Elijah never got the chance to finish his question.  Instead, his mind once again went blank, which lasted for a few moments before he once again found himself within his cultivation cave.  All around him, the water roiled with kinetic energy as well as ethera, and his core felt as if it was going to burst.  It had grown far larger than before he’d been whisked away, and the ethera inside had become much denser, reaching the point where it felt like he held a bowling ball in his chest. 

He grabbed the ethera, wresting it under control.  Agony erupted inside of him as the core grew larger with every passing second.  He clamped down on it, compressing it with every ounce of resolve he possessed.  At first, it barely responded, but after a few agonizing moments, it responded to his will. 

Enduring the pain of so much power rushing through him, Elijah focused on the final step he needed to take before progressing to the next stage.  Leveraging every facet of his Quartz Mind, he took hold of the ethera raging throughout his body and forced it all into his core.  However, he didn’t do it without direction.  Instead, he used that ethera to progressively, layer by layer, reinforce the structure of the core. 

Adding each layer felt like moving a mountain. 

But he persisted in his efforts, and he endured the agony. 

Minute by minute, he shoved more ethera into the core’s structure until he felt like it was on the verge of going supernova. 

Without the advanced stage of his cultivation, Elijah never would have managed it.  His Mind let him control the flows of ethera while quarantining the pain into its own facet.  Meanwhile, if his Quartz Mind gave him the ability to control it all, then his Novice Soul provided the means by which that control could be exerted.  Without those reinforced channels, the process would have backed up. 

Ethera was the source of everything, but too much of even a good thing was tantamount to poison.  The immense flows of energy racing through him was no different, and it required significant durability to withstand so much ethera.  That was where the Body of Stone came into play.  Without reaching the second stage of body cultivation, the powerful flows of energy would have dissolved the flesh from his bones. 

Even with the advantage of his cultivation, Elijah struggled to endure the power of progressing his core.  That, he’d learned, was one of the issues with something like a Dragon Core.  It was far more powerful than other, more normal cores, but that power came at a cost.  One of those was that they often had special requirements attached to their progression.  Elijah had just experienced that for himself, and he expected those conditions would only grow more onerous with each step he took on the so-called Path of Dragons.  In addition, even when those requirements were met, actually progressing a special core required far more effort and ethera.  Doing so before advancing the other aspects of cultivation was generally viewed as suicidal. 

Fortunately, Elijah’s Body, Mind, and Soul had already reached the second stage, which gave him just enough of an edge to manage his powerful core.  Still, it was as exhausting as it was agonizing, but he endured until, at last, his Dragon Core started to absorb every last drop of ethera in the area.  At first, he tried to corral it, but it quickly became apparent that the process had progressed far beyond his ability to control it.  He could only endure and hope that he’d done enough.

Power on a level he’d never experienced raced into the vortexes in his mind, scorching its way through the pathways of his soul, and into his bloated core.  Even as the ambient ethera flooded into him, the surrounding water evaporated.  As he fell to the cave’s floor, the flora and fauna disintegrated, providing even more fuel for the transition.  Elijah barely noticed it.  Instead, the whole of his attention was on the expanding globe of power at the center of his being. 

He leveraged every last ounce of his willpower into compressing it.  One heave after another, it shrank, and inch by inch, relief flooded Elijah’s mind, body, and soul.  Then, just as his exhaustion bypassed the boundaries of what he could endure, the process completed, and he received a notification:

Congratulations!  Your Dragon Core has reached the Whelp Stage.

Just before Elijah’s body gave out, he let out a dry chuckle.  Whelp.  It sounded almost derogatory, and it didn’t indicate the level of power he’d just felt racing through his body.  But before he could contemplate the irony of that name any further, he lost consciousness.