Book 13: Chapter 57: Surroundings

Path of Dragons

“Happy birthday to Treebie,” Elijah sang, gesturing like the conductor of an orchestra. “Happy birthday to you!” He finished with a flourish, adding, “And many more!”

He glanced at the surrounding clay statues and rolled his eyes. “C’mon guys. It’s Treebie’s eighth birthday! I need you to participate, or you’re going to give him an inferiority complex.”

Thankfully, the sculptures remained silent. It wasn’t as if Elijah expected them to speak. Or move. Or do anything but remain perfectly still. They were inanimate objects, after all. He hadn’t gone insane. It was just that sometimes things were easier when he treated them like they were actual people.

That semi-delusion was helped by the fact that he’d made great progress in his sculpting ability, largely because he’d spent so much time on the skill. In fact, over the past year or so, it had become something of an obsession, and the statues weren’t just limited to his closest friends and family. He’d also sculpted representations of people like Ramik, Mari, and even Delilah, who he hadn’t seen in more than a decade.

Even his sister and parents were there, though he’d used mostly generic faces for the latter. After more than twenty years, he couldn’t remember their faces properly enough to build anything more accurate than that.

All in all, there were twenty statues surrounding Treebie, each one wearing a conical hat woven from plant fibers Elijah had harvested. From the tree’s lowest branches hung carved ornaments that Elijah had so far referred to as Treebie’s birthday finery.

The tree seemed to like it.

Though it was hard to tell for sure, because Treebie didn’t talk much. Or at all, save through the pulse of his spirit. And that was extremely difficult to interpret, if it meant anything at all, other than the tree’s normal biological rhythm reflected in the magical construct of his soul.

But Elijah felt confident in his assertion that Treebie felt like a male tree, just like the World Tree seemed distinctly female. Or maybe it was all in his mind, and it just made him more comfortable to assign a gender to his lone living companion. Either way, Elijah saw no need to adjust his assumptions.

None of the others complained about it, at least, which he thought was a good sign – for a lot of reasons.

“Is it just me, or are you getting taller, Miggy?” asked Elijah, nudging the representation of his nephew with his elbow. “I bet all the girls in Ironshore are chasing you by now!”

Elijah took a sip of tea he’d fermented from some of the berries growing in Druhmor. They had a slightly intoxicating effect, mostly because they were wildly poisonous. Without his silver-tier body, it probably would have killed him. But now? It just made him feel a little dizzy, which he chose to interpret the same as if he’d been drinking alcohol.

Of course, he’d tried to ferment some beer as well, but every attempt had ended in ruin. He felt certain he would crack it at some point. He just needed to find the right ingredients.

As Treebie’s eighth birthday party went on, Elijah belted out a few of his favorite songs. Thankfully, he remembered most of the lyrics, even if his attempts at playing a beat on a monster skull left a lot to be desired.

It might’ve been Elijah’s imagination – or just the wind – but he could have sworn the tree’s limbs swayed a little alongside his terrible rendition of Africa by Toto.

In the end, Elijah drank way too much of his berry tea, and at some point, he collapsed face-first into the moist earth. He didn’t awaken for a couple of days, when a splitting headache acted as his de facto alarm clock.

When he sat up, a wave of vertigo tore through him, twisting his stomach into knots, forcing him to vomit. After, he wiped his mouth and cast Blessing of the Grove as he muttered, “I’m never drinking that stuff again.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d made that vow, and he suspected it wouldn’t be the last.

He glanced up at Treebie, whose limbs rustled with laughter.

“Just wait until you’re old enough to drink. You’ll see,” Elijah mumbled.

The tree had changed a lot over the past couple of years. Not only had its bark continued to shift colors – and composition – leaving it a pearlescent white and glittering with a rainbow of hues, but he had grown far more than Elijah could have ever expected.

Most of that growth went downward, with his roots descending dozens upon dozens of miles below the earth. They’d also reached the edge of Druhmor, and Elijah’s ongoing efforts at guiding the pattern had paid massive dividends. The roots grew in sequences mimicking the glyphs Elijah had coaxed out of the fungi, bacteria, and other vegetation.

The result was profound.

Even now, when Treebie still had a long way to go, Druhmor had, at last, become a self-sustaining ecosystem. Even without Elijah’s input, it would resist the degradation of the abyss, pushing back on it at least as effectively as the nine-ring ritual circles surrounding Ithalon or Dravkein.

And it was self-perpetuating, meaning that the tree could repair any damage.

It was an exciting development, but it came with a significant issue. Without the need to constantly tend to the garden of Druhmor, Elijah had quite a lot of free time on his hands.

Mostly, he just used it to commune with Treebie, but those efforts were decidedly one-sided. Which was why he’d concentrated more on the clay sculptures. If he kept going like that, he’d end up with a terracotta army to rival Qin Shi Huang’s.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Technically, his sculptures weren’t actually terracotta, but the combination of dense ethera and the alien clay native to Gorveth meant that it looked similar once it dried.

“Not like there’s an art history major around to point out my misuse of the term, right?” he asked Carmen. “Oh, I bet you’d be the one, wouldn’t you? I could hear the lecture now.”

She remained silent.

In any case, Elijah had recently come up with a plan to fill his days. In addition to his normal exercises – both to strengthen his core in preparation for advancement and a more mundane routine that saw him lifting massive weights he’d quarried from outside Druhmor – he spent most of his day connecting his soul to Treebie’s. That allowed him to monitor his companion’s growth while subtly manipulating the flow of ethera via Nature’s Design. Hopefully, it would end up pushing the tree to new heights of power.

The end goal wasn’t clear, though. At first, Elijah had hoped that incorporating the crystal he’d gotten in Ithalon into Treebie’s structure, he might be able to grow a new Branch. But that idea seemed increasingly far-fetched with each passing day. The tree was special – that much was obvious – but it didn’t feel like a Branch.

Now, Elijah harbored ideas of terraforming the entire world. If Treebie continued to grow at the same rate, it might only take a thousand years for him to spread across the whole planet.

A thousand years.

Elijah had barely spent a decade on the project, so that number made the problem feel insurmountable. More, he wasn’t even certain he’d live that long. Levels and body cultivation tended to lengthen a person’s lifespan, but Elijah had no idea how much. For all he knew, he’d be dead and rotting in half that time.

And that wasn’t even considering the resistance.

Few of the land-based monsters really scared him anymore. It might take him months to finish them off, but Elijah felt certain he could manage it. However, the creatures in the upper atmosphere were all deities – from what he could tell, at least – and the ones living in the depths were probably similarly powerful.

Elijah wasn’t so deluded as to think he could stand up to them.

But for now, he chose not to worry about those things. It felt wrong, not having a specific destination in mind. He was a goal-oriented person, and without one to guide him forward, he felt a little lost. Or like he was just treading water, even when he was making verifiable progress.

So, he’d chosen to focus on short-term plans – one of which concerned the Abyssal Moat.

By now, it was a well-established buffer between Druhmor and the abyss. A grey zone where corruption and vitality mingled. Elijah wanted to change that.

To that end, he soon found himself standing at the edge of the Abyssal Moat and staring at the outer ring of trilithons. He had two choices before him. The easiest would be to simply repurpose the stones for his newest plan. By now, they were mostly unnecessary, what with Treebie’s roots forming the ritual circles necessary to foster the vital environment. So, outside of redundancy, they had no real purpose.

Yet, Elijah had spent so long building the rings that he found himself hesitating to tear them down.

But he also didn’t want to go down the other road, which would see him quarrying enough stone to build more rings. Already, he would need to do that, if only because the next circle would be much, much larger. And he really didn’t want to make more work for himself.

In the end, Elijah chose to leave the rings the way they were, largely because he felt that he could use them as the inner circle for his next array.

So, he spent the next couple of months mapping things out. The new version of the outer ring would be located nearly three hundred miles away from the first, which meant that it would require more than fifty thousand trilithons. Elijah had lost count of the number he’d originally built, but simple math told him that it was about a third of the new requirements.

And that project had taken a little more than a year to complete.

He was determined to increase that pace by quite a bit, a goal helped by the fact that he’d learned quite a few lessons during the first phase of construction. For instance, he didn’t need to search for a quarry. He already had one that would satisfy his requirements. On top of that, his carving method had progressed as well.

Without further ado, he got to it.

The first step was mapping out the intended pattern, which had each trilithon spaced a little less than a hundred feet apart. Given that they were each a hundred feet tall and just as wide, the scale of the project was incredible.

Elijah spent most of that first couple of months marking the construction site, digging holes, and fighting monsters. Then, he got down to quarrying, which took a little more than a year of constant work. Once he’d finished that, he settled the pylons into place.

Carving the tenons and mortice holes was the most tedious aspect of the project, but Elijah managed it by slipping into something of a trance. He was aware of his surroundings, but he didn’t need to focus much on the rote repetition involved in the current phase. After all, they didn’t need to be perfect. Not yet.

In the end, it took him another six months before he was ready to assemble the trilithons. Doing so required every ounce of strength he possessed, but that was the point. He needed to push himself to the limit, lest he come up short of his goal. Amusingly, he actually gained fifteen points of strength during that time – a testament to just how hard he was working.

Of course, he didn’t spend all of his time building. He maintained a truncated version of his routine, bonding with Treebie, killing monsters, and tending to Druhmor. The latter wasn’t really necessary, but he was okay with a little redundancy. Plus, it was relaxing, just guiding plant growth and ensuring that they were as healthy as possible.

But for once, that was just a side job.

His real focus remained on constructing the new outer ring.

At first, he’d started the project just to fill the days. Elijah could admit that to himself. He wasn’t one to sit still and tend to his garden, even if that garden was a bulwark against the abyss. He could do it for a while, but eventually, Elijah got antsy. Couple that with his crippling loneliness – which only got worse with every passing month – and Elijah needed a distraction.

Terraforming the planet was a good way to do that, especially because it was a job without end. Elijah had no illusions about completing it. But he hoped that, once his time ended, Gorveth would be better off than before. That a spark of life and hope would remain.

So, what started as a distraction soon became an obsession.

His pace increased as he fell into that rhythm, and before he knew it, he was carving the system of glyphs and decorative embellishments – he chose a tree motif in honor of Treebie – into each trilithon.

Still, as quickly as he worked, the project was vast. A little more than twelve-hundred miles’ worth of monuments was nearly overwhelming in scope. But he barely thought of it so long as he remained focused on each individual task.

And after nearly four years of solid work, he finally completed that outer ring.

But there were seven more to go, with the old outer ring functioning as the central circle.

With that in mind, he only took a few days to survey the final product before moving on to the next phase.

Thankfully, they required far less work to construct, which meant he managed to finish it all in a little more than a year.

Finally, he carved the last glyph, and the new circle activated.

A thousand cries of pain echoed across the landscape as monsters suddenly found themselves in an untenable environment. From experience, Elijah knew it would drive them mad. Now, he just needed to hunt them down and exterminate them so he could get started on the next phase.

So, with a sigh, he shifted into his dragon form and went on the hunt.