It was quite fascinating to watch how Lia seamlessly slotted herself back into the group dynamic as if we had never split up. Sure, Luna and I had to relay a few stories to give her context for some of the things we said, and she occasionally needed a bit of additional information so she could understand what was going on with Luna’s lingering nightmares but overall, it was incredibly easy to have her back. Easy, comfortable and very reassuring, as, no matter how much I trusted Silva, having Lia back with us and being able to watch Luna’s back when I wasn’t nearby took a load off my shoulders. Hel, having her watch my own back alongside Luna and Silva added quite a bit of security to me, in addition to the significant increase in our objective combat strength. Sure, Lia was now lagging a bit behind me when it came to levels and overall power, but the difference was fairly small, as there hadn’t been all that much EXP coming our way during the two months of travel.
After getting Lia, I quickly realised that there was fairly little we could accomplish by hanging around the Temple of the First Dragon. Sure, the complex wasn’t complete yet, especially when it came to artwork and the all-important dedication of the temple, but there was nothing I could do about that at the moment. To make the artwork, I’d have to make a few fairly large strides with my magical ability, but the dedication? Well, that was an entirely different problem, as I quickly came to realise.
It wouldn’t be enough to know what the statue of my draconic form was supposed to look like. I would have to become that dragon and lay claim to that domain, all by my own power. For now, I could only get the faintest glimpses, a few flickers at the edge of my perception, of said domain, so I would need to become more, though I wasn’t quite certain just what I needed to become, beyond, well, the Dragon. Still, there was no real pressure. The beasts I had elevated would need generations to get close to any draconic state, so I had a few dozen years, if not a century or two, to reach that point, even with the accelerated rate at which everything was changing since, well, the Change. Hopefully, that would calm down soon; the lingering traces of instability and chaos within the Astral River were just a tad annoying.
With nothing left to do to the temple, we carefully sealed it up. The seals were a level beyond those we used to secure the tower, not only physical barriers but also magical barriers, some of them only possible thanks to the knowledge provided by Lady Hecate working through Luna. A few were also adapted from the Grandmother’s grimoire, giving me a few fairly interesting ideas to work with, especially when it came to making something secure, so only a being of my bloodline could break the barrier. All in all, we needed three nights of careful and meticulous work to make the temple as secure as we could possibly make it, and once that was accomplished, we set out once more, travelling, as always, further north.
One big disadvantage of travelling during the night was that with every passing day, there was less of it. Not only because the days were getting longer as spring was giving way to summer but also because we were travelling further north every day. Sure, each of these factors was fairly small individually, but they added up, slowly but surely lessening the time we had to travel. It was the same problem we had the previous year and, just like back then, there was little we could do about it.
So, as we continued to travel northward, the time we spent actually travelling during the night shrunk with each day but, in turn, the time we spent on our experiments got longer and longer, given that the time we spent sleeping remained roughly the same. The experiments followed the usual procedure with relatively little change. Mostly, we took creatures and tried to give them additional elemental abilities while keeping their bodies stable, and by now, we were quite good at that. Maybe not good enough to manage such an experiment on a human without side effects, but it would be the next step. We needed to get some proper feedback from the test subject, which was a lot easier if the test subject could answer questions before and after the experiment. That way, we would hopefully be able to determine the connection between the Mind, various mental traits and states, and elemental affinities. As in, was a person with Fire affinity prone to anger, and was I, as a person with a strong Ice affinity, an innately cold person? While I doubted it would be so easy and straightforward, I was fairly certain that a connection existed. We only needed to figure out what that connection was.
Stolen novel; please report.
The other set of experiments we were working on was the creation of Life, or rather, the acceleration of natural growth. While Luna could grow plants from seed without issues, even keep them stable, now, we were trying to do the same to animals. And that was incredibly difficult for a wide variety of reasons.
Even if Luna and I were working together, with Luna pumping Life Magic into a young animal while I used my Blood Magic, alongside some Darkness Magic, to facilitate the changes necessary to have the animal grow, we had yet to find success. So far, we had managed to give our test subjects about eighty different types of cancer, with a fair amount of other debilitating diseases and injuries adding to that tally. It was quite impressive in how many different ways the procedure we were trying to accomplish could go wrong, how delicate the entire process was and yet, despite all those problems, nature could accomplish it with relative ease.
However, maybe we were just a little too eager and too enthusiastic in our attempts, and it would be easier to take things slow and steady. Maybe we should start trying to approach the process from the other side. Instead of actively speeding up the growth and maturation process, we might want to supply additional energy and see how that might possibly speed up the natural process. It was possible that a less forceful approach would reduce the strain on the system and, in turn, produce less cancer. Even if a part of me was impressed with the sheer variety of things that could go wrong.
Lia, not to be outdone, had resumed her alchemical experimentation. With a bit of prodding from Luna and me, she had decided to see if she could create something similar to the Crimson Ink we had used for the physical enchantments back near Jademoon Tower, only this time, the hope was to create a general Ink to make enchantments easier. Maybe something I could use to make the creation of magical bags easier, as I considered those the most important enchantment I could currently make. Well, the bags and possibly the one to conjure water on demand, though the water conjuration enchantment was mostly useful for other people, not for me.
But, at the end of the day, enchantments were probably the biggest resource we had to trade, other than the products of Luna’s experiments to grow plants swiftly. Food would remain the top commodity for essentially everyone, at least until stable and widespread production and trade could be restored. How long that would take would be interesting to see, but the trade part would likely take quite some time, depending on how widespread the trade network was supposed to be. Additionally, it would be interesting to see whether the oceans here on Terra were as dangerous as those on Mundus, where trade had essentially become a monopoly of a single, primarily aquatic, species.
Thinking of the Naga of Mundus, I wondered if there would be Naga here on Terra. That thought spiralled into an entirely different one, namely, the question of who would rule the oceans, as I quickly realised there likely wouldn’t be enough legacy Naga to provide a stable population, simply due to the numbers involved. There were too few legacy Naga spread across too many locations for them to effectively pair up, and that was assuming that the few people who had chosen to play Naga when Road to Purgatory had been a game even chose to follow their legacy.
With that thought in mind, I began to wonder if we, mostly Luna and I, might be able to create a species similar to Naga, allowing them to rule the sea. It sounded like a fairly fascinating project, though the details were obviously subject to change depending on new information. And, of course, our ability to accomplish such a project in the first place and in viable numbers. We will have to see.
