Chương 98: Spiritual Pulse

Cal poured water over the last glowing embers of the campfire, and steam hissed into the constant drone of the waterfall. A veil of frigid mist clung to the terrain over the narrow strip of rocky ground that separated him from the entrance to the Rootbound Depths.

"Ready, apprentice?" Selara asked. As he approached, he did a final check on the weight distribution of his pack across his shoulders, then hefted his spear, the claw-iron tip gleaming with a razor edge in the morning light. The entrance yawned before him, a dark gap between two massive roots the size of city walls, broken only by faint patches of bioluminescence thrown from lichen clinging to the ancient wood.

The spiritual density in the air was a tangible pressure against his spirit, and the ambient energy quivered through his [Spiritual Perception], a deep bass note far more potent than anything near Deadfall. Cal looked at his mentor and nodded.

"Ready." Selara remained easily confident as her voice grew serious.

"This is where I stop." He'd been expecting it. She continued before he could respond, her hands moving to the pouch at her belt.

"The time for preparation is over, apprentice. Now comes application." She produced a silver whistle on a braided leather cord and held it out.

"This is a runic alarm. Sound carries strangely in the Depths, muffled by the roots and moss, but this will pierce it. A word of caution, though. It isn't selective. Anything nearby will hear it, not just me, so be certain you can handle the attention it brings. And I still have to travel on foot. Even though I am quite fast, the deeper you go, the longer it will take me to reach you."

Cal nodded his thanks and took the whistle, looping the cord around his neck and tucking the device beneath his breastplate against his sternum. For a moment, his thumb pressed against it, confirming its presence. A lifeline. Selara had already produced another set of items: two small vials of milky-orange liquid, which she extended to him.

"Anti-venom for vorlag bites, as promised. It's hjort weasel blood extract, refined and stabilized. Aurelian didn't have a recipe for this but I was able to get some from an adventurer I know who no longer needed it. You'll have about thirty seconds after a bite to drink it, because after that, the neurotoxin's paralysis will have spread throughout your entire body." He stared at the vials, turning them over in his hands before securing them in his belt pouch. This was a long way from the hemlock prowler ambush.

She had guided him into that fight to see if he was worth her time, a savage trial disguised as a test. Now the whistle and anti-venom felt like tools meant to ensure his survival. He appreciated the change in their dynamic. The memory of his first goblin hunt - the desperate, bloody mess that had earned him this chance - felt like it belonged to another lifetime. She had taken that determined "street rat" and opened doors to her library, her knowledge; to a path of real power, while continuing to look out for him.

Staring up at her, he hoped his gratitude showed clearly on his face.

"Thank you." One corner of her mouth lifted.

"Do not thank me yet. Come back in one piece and we shall call it even."

"See you soon," he said, and walked into the darkness between the roots. The moment he rounded a corner, the waterfall's roar vanished into an oppressive silence. A wash of humid warmth covered him, and the air grew thick. Above, the canopy of roots swallowed the sky, leaving only the faint, silvery-green glow of deepgleam lichen to fight the gloom. He engaged [Stealth] and sent his concentrated beam probing the alien environment.

His perception passed over a patch of the bioluminescent fungi, registering its aura as the food source for the native caverin cottontails. The knowledge was pulled directly out of Selara's books. He crept deeper, his beam eventually identifying the auras of the skittering rabbits themselves. They were everywhere, darting through hidden tunnels carved into the roots and surrounding earth, their high-pitched spiritual signatures a nervous flutter against the Depths' deep background drone.

A different landmark caught his attention. Cal stopped and focused his perception on a fresh tunnel bored through the heartwood of an old root. The edges were smooth and uniform, scored by something hard. Though the tunnel's owner was nowhere to be seen, the marker could only have been made by one creature. Probably a blackpelt mole looking for deepwood truffles. He kept going. The hours dragged on.

Cal's search pattern was a methodical grid covering every accessible hollow and alcove within a few hundred yards of his entry point, his perception trying to note every detail while his mind tracked the path. Again and again his senses lanced out, a narrow probe tirelessly checking every root and stone. He found nothing. All the surfaces were bare of glimmerdew moss. By the second hour, a dull irritation had settled behind his eyes; by the third, tension had seeped into his shoulders. This is inefficient.

Cal crouched in a shadowed overhang, driving his awareness across yet another expanse of empty bark. His thumb squeezed hard into the shaft of his spear. The Sovereign Path was built on optimization, on leveraging every advantage to extract maximum value from minimum effort. What he was doing now was the tactical equivalent of banging rocks together. There has to be a better way. He stood, his movements harder now, boots landing with more force than [Stealth] advised.

The methodical grid-search yielded nothing, and the frustration calcified into a cold knot in his gut that wasn't going to dissolve anytime soon. Then a new signature entered his perception's range. Cal went still. The aura was a deep pulse that tasted of damp earth and old wood. It was massive and unhurried, dwarfing the caverin signatures by a few orders of magnitude. E-tier mosshide! The signature was stationary, a slumbering giant tucked into a den fifty yards to the northwest.

Cal stored the location and gave it a wide berth, altering his search pattern to avoid the territory. His lips pinched together, the frustration having nowhere to go as he headed deeper into the Depths. Cal pushed through a dense thicket of ferns, and an aura burst forth into hostile awareness. The vorlag serpent launched from what looked like just another stretch of moss-covered bark he hadn't yet checked.

It was a blur of scale and muscle, thirty feet of it uncoiled, mouth gaping wide, fangs bared and dripping venom. The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement. His body reacted before his mind issued a command. The spear shaft dropped into a low block that he'd never practiced, yet knew like the back of his hand. A thump echoed through the hollow as the serpent's strike met hardwood.

He sidestepped, his boots finding purchase on wet wood while the creature's body whipped past, its momentum carrying it onward. His mind remained coldly detached, logging data while he effortlessly battled the high F-tier spirit beast. Fast recovery for a creature this size, but it's dumb as a box of rocks. All instinct and no thought. The serpent wound up, its black eyes fixed on him. Striking again, it lunged for a bite aimed at his throat.

Cal flowed into a [Dodge], his torso twisting as the fangs snapped inches from his face. His perception registered the cloudy neurotoxin coating the yellowed fangs. Hollow teeth, just like a viper back home. That's a nasty dose of neurotoxin on display. Good thing Selara thought ahead. The serpent recovered, muscles knotting into another loaded whip. He made a false move to the left, executing the act smoothly as the snake tracked the motion, its strike arriving a half-second too slow. Too easy.

Deciding to capitalize on the pattern, he sent a testing thrust at the serpent's flank. His body delivered it on autopilot with textbook form, the spear tip lancing out in a straight line while the point scraped across the bark-like scales, failing to penetrate. Crumb, those scales are pretty hard. I'll need to hit a joint or an eye. The duality of his experience was jarring.

While his body moved like a warrior, guided by instincts from [Spear Mastery] and [Savant of the Body], his mind remained a separate tactician that used [Savant of the Mind] to catalog data points even as his arms moved. It was a far cry from his first adventure into the wilds. And the test was over. He feinted high with his spear tip, a flick of the wrist that drew the vorlag's attention upward; its reflexes were a fraction too slow to see the real threat.

In that brief unguarded moment, Cal adjusted his stance and poured his frustration into decisive action. A perfectly executed thrust punched through the serpent's black eye, the force of the blow driving the weapon deep into its brain. The creature went rigid, then slack, its dead weight pulling it from the spear as it collapsed. Cal shook the blood and grey matter free of his weapon before inspecting the kill.

Kneeling beside the corpse he began [Harvesting], appreciating the brief bout of mortal combat that momentarily relieved him of the mounting pressure from his fruitless search. Selara's texts informed his hands as they butchered the animal. A precise incision behind the jaw exposed the venom sac, a translucent pouch the size of a plum, filled with the dangerous substance. Cal severed the connecting ducts with care and wrapped the sac in a preservation cloth, finally sealing it in a jar.

With that done he searched for the spirit stone, his knife probing the chest cavity… but the search came up empty. The scales were next. Prying off several of the larger plates, he noted their thick, bark-like texture served as natural armor. He packed the plates in a second cloth, then stood and wiped his harvesting knife clean on some moss. Every kill was an asset. Cal found a defensible alcove and sat with his back pressed against damp wood, his spear across his knees.

He stared at the screen of tangled roots across the passage. This is idiotic. Hours of wandering the Depths with a narrow beam of perception, sweeping it back and forth like a blind man with a flashlight, was a colossal waste of time and an insult to the core philosophy he was trying to build his entire future around. I need a way to search a wide-area. Something that lights everything up at once.

He brought to mind the recent memory of Selara's lesson on [Light Orb], her description of the [Continuance] rune for steady effects. His head leaned back against the root behind him as the idea took shape. What if I just overloaded it? Forced it to dump its entire charge in an instant? Cal extended his left palm, the mental blueprint for the Spell already clear in his mind. With his right hand, he drew a thread of Mana and quickly wove the three-part construct into existence above his palm.

A moment later a sphere of white light bloomed, pushing back the oppressive darkness and washing out the lichen's dim glow. He pushed more power into it, feeling the construct thrum as it charged, a stable container building in pressure. Using his Intent he commanded the Spell to release its payload all at once. The orb detonated in a brilliant flash of light. The intensity seared his retinas and he cried out, hands flying to his face as his vision whited out completely. Crumb. Crumb! CRUMB!

Frantically, his perception flew through the surroundings in desperate arcs, searching for threats while his eyes burned with the afterimage of that infernal ball. The world was a useless blur of shifting brightness and shadow, but his experience in the goblin cave let him keep his panic under control. For a minute he thought he might need to dig out a healing potion to try to mend what could have been permanent damage.

Slowly, agonizingly, his vision began to return as the smears resolved into shapes, then details. The alcove came back into focus around him, moss and wood and shadow re-emerging from the blast of light. Cal lowered his hands, blinking rapidly. It worked! The test had been painful and terrifying, but it confirmed his theory. He could overload [Continuance] to create a burst effect. Now for the real proof of concept. Cal excitedly turned his focus inward, forming a single [Continuance] rune in his spirit.

Feeding Mana into it carefully, he stopped when it held nearly a quarter of his entire pool; the rune becoming a dense, humming glyph in his mind. It was a capacitor charged with potential energy, and he recalled the warnings from the Primer's lessons about unstable internal casting. No further. I'm not casting a Spell so the only danger here should be overloading the rune. That, and running around with an overloaded rune in my spirit only to lose control of it… yeah. Don't do that.

He extended a strand of Mana from the charged rune and connected it to his [Spiritual Perception]. When he swept his normal perception beam around the alcove to test it, the drain on his personal reserves stopped. His perception was now fueled by the rune. Perfect. The final preparation was critical, and Cal forged ahead eagerly. He mentally disconnected the part of his perception that was evolved by his Impartments, allowing spatial impressions he could build into a three-dimensional mental map.

Remembering the retinal sear from the [Light Orb] … he made sure his scan would now only detect spiritual signatures, filtering out all the physical noise that gave him overwhelming spatial feedback. That would have been a recipe to turn me into a drooling puddle. He took a breath, impatient to solve this problem that'd been plaguing him all day. Discharge. Cal unleashed his will, commanding the rune to release its stored energy through his perception in an instantaneous pulse. The feedback flooded his mind.

His awareness expanded in an enormous wave, a tsunami rushing outward through root and stone in every direction. The spiritual landscape of the Depths unfolded around him, a holographic star chart projected into his mind. Countless auras ignited like heavenly bodies against the void. Faint, twinkling lights were the F-tier wildlife. Caverin cottontails and blackpelt moles scattered through the tunnels like distant stars.

Brighter, more dominant bodies marked the E-tier beasts: a cluster of vorlag serpents gathered in a communal clump, their collective aura a mass of bark and venom; another signature burning with the hallmarks of a hjort weasel hunting near the surface. One particularly large slumbering sun he felt off to the south, a mosshide bear hibernating in its den. Cal's perception expanded across the entire field, plotting every aura within hundreds of yards. And then he found them.

Scattered throughout the spiritual topography like a vibrant green nebula, he felt multiple distinct sources of the auras he'd been hunting for hours. Glimmerdew moss. A wide grin split his face. It worked better than he had imagined possible. The blue notification shimmered into existence at the edge of his vision.

[New Skill Gained: Spiritual Pulse (F) - Novice] The star chart faded, but its memory remained; he had a map of all the nearby auras of note in the vicinity, even if he didn't know exactly how to get to them. He could still travel in the relative direction and use his spatial beam to find a way. But as the feedback from his pulse faded, his grin began to slip.

Left in the quiet dark of his own limited perception once again, a part of his subconscious that had been screaming for his attention finally influenced his internal monologue. That pulse went hundreds of yards. The elation collapsed into a sickening dread that shot ice through his veins. The [Feathered Edge]. I was so focused on finding a solution I completely forgot to apply [Feathered Edge]! His pulse had done more than observe.

It had struck every creature in range with a spiritual shockwave, the metaphysical equivalent of kicking down every door in a neighborhood and blaring his location at the top of his lungs. Cal's thoughts raced, reviewing the momentary map of auras. The distant, dormant star of the bear. The scattered F-tier sparks. And the other E-tier signatures. One of them had been close. Frighteningly close.

He whipped his narrow beam of perception toward the last known location, Mana bleeding from his reserves as he expanded it to examine the tunnels quickly. It didn't take him long. There was the powerful vorlag serpent, and it was moving fast. He tracked its trajectory for a horrifying moment. The creature was less than ten seconds away and coming right for him.