Chapter 204: The Peak
Everything was not just repaired to their previous state but renewed, which was a different thing, the material of the cores emerging from the process denser and more integral than it had been before the ruptures, as though the healing the fruit produced worked not just to the previous baseline but beyond it.
His life force, which had been stabilised by the Eye of the Future but had not been genuinely restored to what it should have been, began to rise.
Not gradually. Rapidly.
He felt it in every part of him, the rising moving through his physical structure and his energy structure simultaneously, the two of them responding to the fruit’s effect together, and the level it reached was not the level he had been at before the Analyzer penalty had begun taking effect but considerably beyond it, the life force that emerged from the fruit’s work hundreds of times more robust than even his original baseline.
Freya was silent during this process, but her silence had the quality of someone genuinely amazed by something rather than simply waiting.
His physical structure changed.
Subtly but comprehensively, the impurities that had accumulated in the body’s tissues over years of fighting and damage and the ordinary biological accumulation of toxins and inefficiencies simply ceased to be there, removed by the fruit’s effect with the same thoroughness it had applied to everything else, and the structure that remained was cleaner and denser and more capable than what it had been before the fruit.
Even his skin, which was not something he had been thinking about, felt different in a way that was immediately obvious when he raised his hand and looked at it, softer and without the particular roughness that came from accumulated damage and the weathering of difficult environments.
He sat in the centre of the cooling field with Magnar pressed against him and let the fruit’s effect complete itself in its own time.
When it was done he sat in the quiet for a while.
"I know." Freya said, and her voice was doing the complicated thing again, the thing where she was feeling several things she was not entirely ready to name.
"That fruit." She continued, after a moment. "On Zenetor, finding something at that grade would be extremely difficult. The resources required, the rarity of the materials, the specific knowledge needed to produce it." She paused. "On Zoratian, which does not have anything that comes within several tiers of that quality in the natural environment, finding something like that would be essentially impossible without significant external effort." Another pause. "Shadow brought it from Zenetor specifically. For you. She did not bring it as a convenience, she brought it as the specific thing your condition required."
Neil said nothing.
"Your mother’s friend." Freya said, more quietly.
He looked at the sky above the frosted and volcanic field, the overcast grey of it unchanged by everything that had happened beneath it in the past twelve hours.
"Yeah." He said.
Magnar made a sound against his side, low and steady, the familiar equivalent of being present without asking anything.
Neil put his hand back on Magnar’s head and they sat there in the cooling field, the frost spreading its patterns in one direction and the lava solidifying in slow flows in the other, until the exhaustion he had been holding back caught up with him completely and he lay down on the flat ground and was asleep before he had made a conscious decision to be.
Neil sat on the flat cooling ground for a while longer after waking, his back against Magnar’s side, looking at nothing in particular while his mind ran through the current state of things with the quiet and methodical quality it adopted when he gave it space to do so without pressure.
The Analyzer skill was available again.
That was the fact that kept returning to the front of everything else, not because it was the most dramatic development of the past few days but because of what it meant in practical terms. The skill that had been costing him life force every time he used it, that had been draining his mother in his place before the penalty transferred, was now functional and clean and available without that cost, and what that meant was that he could use it without restriction for the first time since he had understood what it was doing.
Two thousand deaths before the fruit’s effect wore off.
That was not a number he planned to reach quickly, but knowing it was there changed the texture of every dangerous situation between here and that threshold, because a skill that let you understand what had gone wrong and do better next time was one thing when you used it sparingly, and something considerably more powerful when you could use it freely.
He rolled his shoulder and checked the state of his cores, which had healed completely under the fruit’s work, denser and cleaner than before, the saturation complete and the energy within them fully converted to the phantom essence form.
Peak of the third Origin.
He looked at his hand, turned it once, felt the energy sitting in it with a density that was genuinely different from anything he had carried before the twelve-hour process.
’One more second Order Diamond class domain core.’ He thought. ’That is all that is between here and the evolution.’
The lost elven kingdom was not a distant prospect anymore. The timing on it had been narrowing steadily, the various parties with interest in the location all moving toward it at their own paces, and Caleb’s preparations had a momentum to them that suggested it was not going to wait much longer. Neil needed to be at the right level when he walked into that place, because walking in at the wrong level with Rabid Wolf and whatever else Caleb had arranged waiting in the environment was an approach with obvious consequences.
’Nemo.’ He said.
"Master." Nemo replied, immediately present.
’Find me the closest second Order Diamond class domain core. Anywhere. Any race.’
"Searching." A pause that was short enough to suggest the result was close. "Master, there is one within the same settlement as your domain. The distance from your current location to that domain is approximately four kilometres. It is a second Order Diamond class domain, consistent with what you need."
Neil was quiet for a moment.
’In the same settlement.’
"Yes master."
He stood up.
Magnar was on his feet before Neil had fully straightened, because Magnar could read the shift from sitting to moving before it completed, and he looked at Neil with the amber eyes that were asking the obvious question.
"Home first." Neil said. "Then we deal with the core."
He looked at Magnar’s current size, which was the large version that had been appropriate for the Realm and was not appropriate for moving quickly through settled territory, and made a gesture that Magnar had learned to read as the instruction to compress.
Magnar did not enjoy this. He expressed this opinion through the particular quality of the sound he made while doing it, a low and sustained complaint that was not defiance but was definitely commentary, his frame condensing from the expansive version down to something that was still large by the standards of domestic familiars but was manageable for running through a settlement without causing incidents.
Neil crouched and Magnar came down to allow him to climb, and then they were moving, Neil flattened low against Magnar’s back and the familiar running at the full speed his compressed form could produce, which was considerably faster than anything that looked like a running animal had any right to be.
The terrain between the empty field and the settlement boundary passed quickly.
Randy was outside the domain gate.
This was not a surprise because Randy was often in unexpected places at unexpected times, appearing as though the concept of being somewhere specific was something he engaged with only loosely, and standing outside someone else’s domain gate looking at the sky was entirely within the range of things Randy did for reasons he had not explained and would not explain if asked.
He looked at Neil when Magnar came to a stop near the gate, and his expression did the thing it did when he was reading something he found interesting, the slight sharpening behind the easy surface.
"Done with the Mantel Stone Realm then." He said. It was not a question.
Neil got down from Magnar. "Yes."
Randy looked at him for a moment longer than a casual glance required, the kind of look that moved through the surface and checked what was underneath it, and Neil had the familiar experience of being examined by someone whose perception was considerably broader than he made it look.
"Your essence." Randy said, in the tone of someone noting something without making a production of it. "Different."
Neil said nothing.
Randy’s expression shifted into something that was not quite approval and not quite surprise but contained elements of both, and then settled back into his usual ease. He looked at the sky again, which was the overcast grey that it had been all day.
"Good." He said. "You will need it for whatever comes next." A pause. "She came through here recently."
Neil looked at him.
Randy was still looking at the sky, his expression carrying something that was not his usual performance of carelessness but was the actual version of a feeling he was not making any particular effort to show or hide.
Neil thought about the shadow on the path home.
❖❖❖
Thanks for reading...
