Sava chewed on that thought for a while, contemplating in silence.
“Anyway” I continued, dismissing the topic for the time being. “Look what I got,” I showed her the pouch of spellhearts that Yorik had so kindly transported for me.
“Not bad. These are all upper low-grade or mid-grade spellhearts.”
My interface agreed with her upon consultation.
Fire aspect spellheart (mid-grade)
This spellheart can be cultivated to allow for the use of fire magics.
Earth aspect spellheart (mid-grade)
This spellheart can be cultivated to allow for the use of earth magics.
Lighting aspect spellheart (low-grade)
This spellheart is made from a combination of fire and water zeal and can be cultivated to allow for the use of lighting magics.
“I picked the biggest ones. I’ll have to thank the local law enforcement personnel for collecting them for me. I had Yorik haul them out for me in case the memory wipe wasn’t perfect, but it seems that precaution wasn’t necessary and I could have just pocketed them myself.”
Sava spent the rest of the walk back to her camp telling me the basics about how to utilize the power of a spellheart. We took turns alternating between pulling the cart of supplies and trying our luck with different spellhearts.
“Ha! I knew I had a good feeling about this one!” Sava said triumphantly holding a small blue spellheart. She had just finished conjuring a small drizzle of water with the spellheart in her hand.
“Impressive. The ability to conjure freshwater is always useful,” I nodded along. “Doesn’t look particularly lethal, but you have your nature spellheart for that.”
Sava shrugged. “I could, but I can already get drinkable tree sap from my nature spellheart, which is a high grade spellheart. Better to just merge it. Besides, I’d never be able to fully bond to it otherwise, since I’m already bound to my nature spellheart.”
Then Sava pulled out her green nature spellheart and held the blue water spellheart next to it. There was something like a battle of wills between the two cores. Both started to vibrate until the smaller water spellheart cracked.
The force Sava’s nature spellheart exerted shattered the smaller blue stone, spraying a cloud of blue dust through the air. Sava closed her eyes and breathed deeply, and nearly half of the little blue particles flowed towards her, guided to her nature spellheart by her will.
The blue particles attached to the nature spellheart before seeping into it, tingeing Sava’s nature spellheart a bit bluer in hue than it had been previously.
“You can combine spellhearts?” I said in surprise.
“Well, you can break them down and absorb some of the zeal they contain. It’s not very efficient, but considering the amount of zeal a spellheart has it’s often the fastest way to push your spellheart up to the next level in quality. And what I just did was a little risky, and I could only do it because my spellheart was several layers above the one I just destroyed. Drawing that much water zeal into a nature spellheart has twisted my spellhearts affinity a bit closer towards water. I’ll need to cultivate more earth zeal to balance it out.”
“Huh. So why not keep it as a spellheart? You wouldn’t have such losses from absorbing it into your spellheart that way.“
“I’m afraid cultivation doesn’t work that way. There are methods to walk multiple paths at once, but they aren’t simple and they’re definitely not easy. Trust me when I say you’re better off picking one source of power and making it as strong as you can get it.”
“What’s that?” I asked curiously.
“Reaching the next stage of cultivation requires you to fuse the spellheart to your body. You have to become one with it. That’s not possible unless you’ve fully bonded with your spellheart. If you’re constantly switching between dozens of spellhearts you’ll never be able to fully bond any one of them.”
“I see,” I said, and her words made sense. He who chases two hares will catch neither.
CHAPTER TWELVE
IT WASN’T UNTIL I came across a nondescript brown spellheart that I finally managed to cast something.
The moment I touched the earth aspect spellheart I felt a connection to it that was unlike any of the others. No wonder I’d never gotten the death spellheart to work. This connection existed on a level beyond the physical.
I knew that even if this tiny brown crystal were dropped in the mud in the middle of the night I’d be able to locate it again without effort. Sava was impressed that I was able to bind it to such a degree after just touching it.
With a thought, I cast my first spell. Nothing complicated, just an attempt to touch the zeal inside it. It was just like flipping a switch in my mind. Suddenly the spellheart emitted a small wave of energy, which caused a small cloud of dust to rise up from the earth around me. It felt a lot like manipulating controls on my implant.
“Impressive. It usually takes a few days to manage even that much.” Sava said.
I didn’t really think it was too impressive, but this was a stepping stone! Being able to do anything at all meant that the biggest hurdle had already been passed!
I flipped the switch off in my mind to extinguish the effect. Then I flipped it back on. Off and on, off and on again and again until it barely took an instant of concentration to activate the spellheart’s power.
Sava quickly overcame her surprise at my unexpected competence, given my complete lack of training. “Cute little spell Theo, but it’s highly inefficient. You’re wasting zeal right now. If you keep casting spells like that your spellheart will shrink until it’s unusable. I’ll teach you how to properly use magic tonight. And how to draw zeal from the natural environment.”
”As eager as I am to learn more magic, I think both you and I know you’ve got other plans for tonight," I said with a wink.
Sava blushed, and I grinned. She’d been practically clinging to my arm ever since we’d escaped those gangsters. Even a clueless nerd like me could take a hint. “A shame you bonded the only earth spellheart we got. Now I’ll have to spend time cultivating the hard way. Luckily, I have just the place. I’ll show you when you’re ready.”
It was almost sunset by the time we made it back to Sava’s residence at the edge of the territory of the Riverweed tribe. Sure enough, Sava skipped the lesson she promised. We gnawed on some leftover food from that morning and then she beckoned me to bed.
Who was I to refuse such a woman? Especially one who was my landlord. Granted, she did kind of kidnap me.
“I can’t believe I wasted so much time with you before we did this!” Sava moaned as she rode me.
“You were still in mad alchemist kidnapper mode back then,” I said, bouncing Sava up and down on my cock with my arms.
It didn’t take much longer for the elf to let loose a cry of pleasure, which was quickly followed by a matching cry of my own.
Sava climbed off of me and sank down cross legged and straight-backed on the ground. She entered a meditative stance and breathed deeply and deliberately.
“Sava? What are you doing?” I asked curiously.
“Shh, Theo, didn’t you feel that? Sense the zeal in the air around us!”
As I basked in the afterglow, I noticed something funny happening in the air around the two of us.
“What are these?” I asked Sava, poking at the tiny specs of light that were dancing in the surrounding air.
Sava blinked at me. “You can see them? Nevermind, a chaka thing I imagine. Do what I do! This is a rare chance, don’t let it go to waste!”
She sat up, sitting cross-legged with her palms facing up in her lap. She sat straight-backed and let out a deep breath, loosening her muscles.
I did the same, though much slower. I’d meditated before, but after realizing enlightenment wouldn’t grant me fantastic mystic powers I gave up on the hobby. In this world, it actually could grant me mystic powers, so I wouldn’t be giving up so easily here.
“Focus on a
point, Theo. Visualize the particles of light swirling together, settling and forming a structure around that point.”
I did as she said, and much to my surprise, the flecks of light stopped moving randomly and started drifting slowly towards me.
“You’re losing them Theo! You must maintain constant focus!”
She was right. I was so caught up in amazement watching the floating specs of light be drawn towards me and Sava that I forgot to focus on the invisible point above my hands. The moment I restored my focus the particles began drifting towards me again.
It took me an hour to really get the hang of what we were doing. By then I had a sizable spec of light, about a fifth the size of my admittedly small earth aspect spellheart.
“Not bad, Theo! Yours is nearly as big as mine!” Sava said holding up a small white spellheart of her own.
“So, you just made a spellheart, I take it? And that was... vitality?”
Sava nodded. “Just so. This little stone is extremely high in terms of vitality. There’s a whole mess of lesser zeals mixed in that the vitality is riding on top of, and they won’t be useful for anything, but the vitality can be transferred and extracted, being of tremendous use in cultivation. Unfortunately, vitality spellhearts like this aren’t stable, so they have to be used immediately. This was great! Normally it would have taken me a year to gather that much vitality from plants and animals! And you filled this whole room! A lot of that’s because the vitality you produce, unlike other creatures, is directly compatible with elves, but part of that is also from the sheer quantity of vitality you shed at times like these.”
“We’ve done this before though and nothing weird happened. What was different this time?” Sava usually went quiet after we slept together, and she usually said the experience was good for her cultivation base, but this was different.
“You! You’re amazing Theo. You must have experienced a breakthrough in your cultivation base. You’re still locked at the zero layer of zeal accumulation because you haven’t finished binding a spellheart, but I think once you do you’ve got the vitality to immediately jump right over the first layer of zeal accumulation. Now be quiet and watch.”
Sava took the ball of vitality I’d condensed from my hand and held it to her lower abdomen, pressing it against her bare skin. Then it vanished into her body.
I blinked. “What just happened? You can absorb vitality into your body that way?”
Sava laughed. “No silly. I absorbed it into my womb. I’m preparing to lay an egg!”
I blinked again. “Wait, so that was for real? Elves lay eggs!?”
It was Sava’s turn to look confused. “Well how else are you supposed to make new elves? How do ‘humans’ do it?” She put air quotes around the word humans, like she still believed I was making that up.
“Well, for humans, the mother carries the baby inside her, and then they pop out and cry for milk and hugs and diaper changes.”
“They just... pop out?” Sava stifled a giggle. “Like, fully alive and walking around?”
“Babies can’t walk around right away. They need a few years before that.”
Sava’s composure broke down and she started laughing uncontrollably. “Theo... I think your mother just didn’t want to tell you where babies came from.”
“It’s true! It might not be how elves are born, but that’s where humans come from!”
Sava, still laughing, shook her head. “How would women fight if they had another person inside them? How would they work? For that matter, how would a whole person fit inside another person?”
“They’re babies! They’re smaller than adults. They have short little stubby arms and legs and big heads that their necks can barely hold up. They don’t really do anything until they grow a little, they just sort of sit there and be babies. I don’t know, I’m not a developmental biologist.”
Sava giggled again. “Alright Theo. If that’s what you want to think then so be it. Just make sure you stick around when your daughter hatches, okay?”
“Fine...” There was no use trying to teach human biology to Sava. She clearly didn’t believe a word of it. I still had my doubts though about whether I could even produce offspring with an elf.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I AWOKE TO quiet morning air. Surprisingly, Sava was next to me, sound asleep. Usually she always woke up before me and had breakfast well in hand by the time I rolled out of bed. Maybe it was time I return the favor.
I knew my way around Sava’s tree house well enough to find supplies. The big black plank of wood served the same purpose as a stove, treated as it had been in the same manner as the ironwood except imbued with aspects of fire and heat. I tossed some vegetables in a pan carved of similarly dense ironwood. It wouldn’t burn and served as a useful substitute for iron among elvish tools and craft.
After digging out Sava’s pan, I picked out a selection of our usual food. I didn’t see any oil, so I ended up cutting the fattiest portion of some type of plant-rabbit hybrid creature into a handful of thin strips. My idea was to make bacon, but really it ended up being more like fibrous meat chunks. Still, I got a few good strips of plant meat cooked.
That alone hardly made a good breakfast. I didn’t think Sava kept much flour around, which ruled out pancakes. And for practically anything else I’d need eggs.
Ah an egg! I spotted something on the table. It had an odd sheen to it, like a yellowish glimmer, but otherwise it looked much like a chicken egg.
I shrugged. Right, breakfast.
But then a thought struck me. Wait a moment. What was that Sava said about laying an egg?
“Oh, you saw it,” Sava said, yawning as she got out of bed.
I quickly backed away from the frying pan.
”Yeah, I saw it...”
“Bigger than I expected. I think she’ll be born much stronger than usual.”
“So... there’s an elf inside of this?” I asked. “It looks a little… small.” I was holding the egg very gently now.
Sava simply snorted and shook her head. “You and your ridiculous stories about children popping out alive and fully formed with arms and legs and that nonsense. If you’d ever laid an egg you’d know I was struggling to lay that for a solid five minutes while you snoozed away. I would have woken you for it, but it came a full week sooner than I expected. This little girl grew fast. Probably the amount of vitality we loaded her with last night.”
“Should you be sitting on this or something? You know, keeping it warm?”
Sava rolled her eyes again. “We’re not birds Theo. She just needs time to naturally cultivate and grow. In fact, staying too close to her will cause our natural energy absorption to interfere with hers. Better to just leave her be. I’ll take her somewhere special soon. That’s where she’ll be able to absorb the most zeal. With help, it will only take her a few years to mature into an elf. Speaking of, since you’re going to become an earth aspect heartwielder you may want to try and cultivate there yourself,” Her eyes darted back and forth, making sure nobody else was listening. “Don’t tell anybody,” she whispered in a low tone. “But a couple years ago I found a nexus.”
I matched her conspiratorial tone. “A nexus. Oh excellent… what is a nexus?”
Sava rolled her eyes. “Usually a magical nexus is where at least two ley lines cross. The one I found though isn’t natural, which is why nobody’s built a school on top of it. I imagine some ancient, powerful cultivator created an artificial nexus to train in. Or maybe it was created by a dungeon core establishing itself in the nearby area. I don’t really know, but at its current level it will be very useful to someone in the first few layers of zeal accumulation. I certainly wouldn’t have reached the sixth layer this fast without it. And you, of course.”
Sava took over my crude attempt at breakfast and soon enough we had an edible meal. Afterwards, she decided it was time to take both me and her egg to her secret little grotto.
It didn’t seem too impressive at first glance
. Just a tiny little glade with a stream running through it. It was surrounded by moss-covered trees and a ring of thorny vines. I had to crawl through a tiny gap between the vines that Sava showed me to get inside.
That’s when the feeling hit me. I’d been learning how to detect zeal thanks to my efforts at practicing with the earth aspect spellheart, and this place was positively overflowing with energy.
According to Sava, this secret nexus was the whole reason why Sava settled down off in the distance, away from the main center of the Riverweed tribe. She could have been a lot closer if she wanted. Instead she built her tree house out here, just barely within sight of the nearest tree houses. And even those were on the outskirts of Riverweed territory. Sava liked the quiet most days, and though it made it harder to sell potions, she had her privacy and the wild forest plants hadn’t been picked clean this far from the main Riverweed settlement.
“See that little flat stone dais in the center? That’s where I usually sit. It must be some sort of treasure, because when I sit there my mind clears and my zeal accumulation rate triples!”
“Let me give it a try,” I said curiously. I was still new to this whole cultivation thing but tripling my cultivation rate sounded like a very good thing. “Do I have to turn the thing on?”
“No, just sit on it and let it do its thing. Try it with earth zeal. You cultivated life zeal last night, but this will be a little different, since you actually have a spellheart for earth. Take out the earth spellheart and focus on it.”
Sava switched into lecturing mode while I calmed my breathing, and settled down cross-legged into the posture I’d always seen people meditate in. “I’m going to teach you the most basic cultivation technique there is, the one everybody starts with. It simply involves getting a feel for the earth zeal around you, and pulling a little of it towards you.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh: A Cultivating Gamelit Harem Adventure (Spellheart Book 1) Page 16