I smiled wider. “About time something went my way. I’ve always wanted to be talented at something.”
“I think you’ve got a knack for cultivation, Theo. I bet in a few short years you could even catch up to me. Of course, I’ll be even further ahead by then, thanks to you.”
I winked. “Give me three months.”
Sava checked on me three more times to see if I was ready to call it a night, but I kept training. I was just starting to really get a feel for this earth magic stuff. At the moment, I was trying to figure out how to pack ordinary dirt together into harder clumps.
It seemed that my particular spellheart favored dirt over stone, and because of this I was able to manipulate the former to a far more accurate degree and utilize it in higher quantities as well. Unfortunately, dirt balls just don’t pack as much of a punch as rocks. I wanted to find a way to pack the dirt tight enough that they wouldn’t come apart when I hit something. Or at least pack a little more force. Besides, I couldn’t always depend on finding conveniently sized rocks whenever a fight broke out, but I could be reasonably sure that there would always be dirt somewhere nearby.
I’d had some moderate degree of success, but they still weren’t sufficient for making projectiles. After making dozens of piles of hardened dirt, I came to the realization that this stuff might actually be pretty useful as a building material. Sava lived out of a tree, but there were whole hosts of smaller buildings on the ground, like shoddier versions of what I’d seen in town. I knew from looking around that I’d be able to design better buildings and structures than what I’d seen so far, and if my magic let me do it quickly, I might be able to provide a valuable service worth money. Besides, at the very least it was good practice.
And that’s how I got into construction. Four days and a dozen failed experiments later I’d finally managed to make an enclosed one-story structure using earth zeal. I’d never worked in masonry before, but I was certain this was a lot faster and easier than trying to stack bricks. My final creation was a squat, circular building with a dome over the top. I don’t know anything about architecture, but I do know domes are strong shapes I cut a little reinforced hole in the top center for a smoke stack and built a combination support column chimney in the middle. I also strengthened the sides and cut a few windows out to bring some light in.
It wasn’t the Hagia Sophia, but it didn’t immediately collapse in on itself, so I chalked it up as a win. It was a far cry from the glorious hundred story wizards tower I’d first envisioned, but sacrifices had to be made for practicality. Baby steps.
I made a few dividers to set up rooms and was trying to dig out an underground tunnel for the bathroom I was building when Sava finally got back. She’d been out on another plant gathering trip, this one lasting more than a day.
“Theo, not to disparage your taste in decor, but what’s with all the piles of mud?”
I jumped behind her and covered her eyes.
“They were practice.” I replied. “Now no peeking, I have a surprise for you!”
I walked her with her eyes covered to the front door of my mud house.
“Tada!” I said, pulling my hands out from in front of her. “I made a house!”
“Ah... it’s very... homely.” Sava said lamely.
I frowned. “You don’t seem very impressed.”
“No! It demonstrates a skillful and creative project with earth zeal. I could never have done something like this with my nature spellheart. However, all these structures are very visible. I’m on the outskirts of the Riverweed tribe territory, but not that far away. I’d rather not draw attention to this area if I can help it. The tribe will seize control of the grove if they find it, which means no more fast and easy zeal accumulation for us.”
“You’re not impressed with my house.” I said crossing my arms.
“It will be a very nice place for you to sleep. And for me to store some materials. It looks like they’re faster than growing a tree with a home inside it, so maybe you could make a garden. It just looks a tad uncivilized.”
“What? Uncivilized? How is this worse than sleeping in a tree?”
“No self-respecting wood-born elf would sleep in the dirt when there’s a perfectly good tree nearby.” Sava replied.
“Oh, come on, before coming here I lived underground. There wasn’t a dot of sunlight to be seen, and behind my walls were hundreds of feet of packed dirt. Even so, it was a clean, comfortable place to live. At least, that’s how it was before I made a mess of it.”
Sava visibly recoiled. “You lived in the ground? Like a mole? Or worse, a dwarf!?”
“That’s right! And I liked it too.” I glared at her. “You know, you should be a bit more understanding of people who are and live differently from you.”
The elven herbalist glanced furtively between me and my dirt building. “Fine. I’m sorry I insulted your… house.”
I smiled “Alright, I’ll forgive you if you spend one-night living with me in my mud hut.”
In the end Sava broke down and agreed. I even talked her into reinforcing the walls by using nature magic to grow a thin matrix of fibrous plant roots throughout the hardened dirt walls. The end result was that a layer of deep green moss covered the entire outside surface of the structure, which went a long way to offsetting the ugly brown color and hiding its presence by matching the surrounding undergrowth. All in all, I was actually rather proud of my creation, even if Sava wasn’t.
She complained frequently about how living on the ground was for bears, trolls, dwarfs, and orcs. And how that any day one of those scary ground-dwelling creatures was going to sneak up and attack us in our sleep, and that we were crazy for sleeping on the ground when there were perfectly good trees available to hang a hammock in. She didn’t shut up until I started telling her about the first shelter I’d built, the lean-to made of dead leaves and sticks. She went quiet after I threatened to change the deal to a night in one of those.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Several days later, we were cultivating in Sava’s secret cultivation-enhancing glade. I was seated on the central flat stone slowly accumulating earth zeal. I’d gotten better at the task, to the point where I could work nearly three times as fast as originally. Sava was in the middle of teaching me a trick that I could use to make cultivation easier. I’d been going through a lot of zeal for my building projects and various experiments. Unless I found a way to replenish my reserves more quickly, I wouldn’t be able to keep this pace up.
“You’re at the level where you can pull many individual pieces of earth zeal towards you at the same time. That means you’re ready for a better zeal accumulation technique. This one is simple, and it’s pretty much universal across the elements.” Sava stroked her egg, which she’d pulled off the dais to make room for me.
“Imagine yourself in the center of a hurricane. You are in the eye, at the calm center. All around you the storm rages, spinning around you. It is slowest farthest away from you, but as the wind gets closer the power and speed of the storm grows more powerful. Imagine that you are generating this storm with every breath. With every breath, the storm brings the earth zeal closer to you, forcing it together in the surrounding air. From there it should be easy to compact it and add it to your spellheart.”
I did as she said. The cycling technique came to me surprisingly easily. The air swelled around me and the earth zeal spun in slow circles drifting towards me, resisting their nature as they floated through the air. I frowned. That didn’t seem right. Forcing the earth zeal to resist its nature was making the cycling technique slower. Surely there must be a way to get the earth zeal to come towards me without compromising its natural tendencies.
Maybe I could simply have it flow towards me across the ground? No, let it sink towards me! That felt right. Earth obeys the forces of gravity, so I just needed to shift that in my favor.
But just as I was beginning to get lost in thought, Sava shouted something that broke my concentration.
“It’s hatching!”
I blinked. The egg!
Suddenly a huge crack rippled across the shell of the greenish-yellow egg in Sava’s hands.
I stared at it intently. I wasn’t sure if I expected a tiny fist sized-elf to pop out of there or what, but I definitely knew that thing was way too small to have a baby inside of it.
What actually happened was even more surprising though. Instead of a tiny elf, a shower of golden-green light sparkled in the air. But the sparks didn’t fade. Instead they came together and formed a glowing ball of light. It was like a firefly, but too bright to look at. There might have been something inside that ball of light, but I couldn’t make it out.
“What the heck is that?” I asked.
“That’s your daughter, Theo.” Sava said in a motherly tone. Which I suppose was fitting given the situation.
“Why is she a glowing ball of light?”
“She’s a wisp. Like all elves when first born. She won’t take physical form for a few years yet. At least not until she’s accumulated enough zeal.”
“I know I’ve said this before, but that’s not how biology works.”
Sava shrugged, but then her brow furrowed, and a look of concentration appeared on her face.
“I think I may have spoken too soon... that’s not a girl, that’s a boy!” She said excitedly.
I blinked. “You can tell?”
“Theo, this is important! Male elves are one in a thousand, especially if you’re only counting the ones who aren’t cripples. Having a fully healthy son? Your line is virtually certain to spread across the kingdom!”
“Well, what should we name him?”
“What about... Sofi, or Sali, or —”
“No, no son of mine is going to stuck with a name like Sue. Give him something tough. Something that will make the other kids think twice before pushing him around on the playground. How about Tyrael, or Thanos?”
“You just want his name to start the same as yours!” Sava huffed.
“I could say the same about all of your suggestions, Sava!”
“In elvish culture, typically, the mother names the child.” Sava chided. “Although, that’s usually because the father has too many children to care.”
“Fine, how about... Le- no, Segolas!” I’m an idiot. That name is a total rip off of —
“I love it!” Sava said aloud. “Segolas it is. Come here Segolas.”
To my surprise the little glowing ball of light actually obeyed.
“So, when does he grow up? Or at least not become more than a wisp?”
Sava shrugged. “This location is good for cultivation with many types of loose zeal. It will probably only take him three or four decades to build a body.”
“Three or four decades!” I said in surprise. Then with a sudden thought I asked “Sava, how old are you?”
At first, I feared Sava might take the inquiry as personally, since back home it was often considered taboo to ask about a woman’s age. Sava however didn’t seem the slightest bit bothered by the question. It probably had something to do with the fact that elves don’t seem to age.
“Was a wisp for just under a hundred and fifty years. It takes ages for a wisp to manifest a body this far from a good vitality source.” Sava glanced at me. “Although, any wisp that hangs around you is bound to grow into an elf quite a bit faster.”
One hundred and fifty years!
I wasn’t able to conceal my look of surprise fast enough. She didn’t look a day over twenty.
“How old are you, Theo?” She asked curiously.
“Well, this year I’ll be twenty-three... twenty-three hundred!” I managed to tack on two extra zeroes. Women like older men, right?
“Over two thousand!” Sava said in surprise. Then she shook her head. “I think not. If you were that old I’m sure you would have at least fused a spellheart by now. No, I’m pretty sure you’re quite a bit younger than me.”
“Fine, you caught me.” I grumbled. My best lies were always being saved for when they actually counted anyway. “I’m actually twenty-three.”
“You’re a little baby!” Sava giggled. “I knew it. Wow, you must have grown up inside a mana well to have left the wisp stage so quickly.”
“Humans are adults at eighteen!” I complained. “And we don’t go through a ‘wisp stage’ like elves.”
Sava rolled her eyes. She still didn’t believe my story about hailing from a race of magical beings that would pop out from between their mothers’ legs already in physical form.
“Fine then. How old are you?” I asked, bracing myself for a number that would put her over my great-great-grandparents age.
“This year, I’m twenty-six!”
She couldn‘t get me to stop laughing for a full fifteen minutes.
***
For the next half hour, I told Sava more stories about earth, which she continued to dismiss as fantasies made up by my ‘little baby head’.
“No, I’m serious. Back on earth there were huge tall buildings filled with lots of tiny boxes called cubicles. In the old days they used computers, but now with VR input terminals it’s so much faster.”
“You can’t fool me, Theo! A wizard’s tower doesn’t work if you have more than one person using it, and you’re trying to convince me that hundreds of pe — “
Sava froze mid-sentence. I blinked.
“Sava? Are you there?” I waved my hand in front of her face. It was like she’d completely zoned out.
Then a large green figure burst through the tree line. It was Yorik, the orc.
“You, strong elf!” Yorik said urgently with a note of panic in her voice. “Before you offered Yorik a place in your tribe. Yorik accepts! Yorik swears her hammer to the chief!”
“Woah, slow down, Yorik. First, unfreeze Sava here.”
Yorik stumbled to her feet and fidgeted with her mind spellheart. Sava blinked. After a long moment her eyes suddenly snapped into focus.
“You!” She glared at the orc.
“Play nice.” I told her, though really it was directed at them both. They glared fiercely at each other despite my warning.
After a bit of coaching I separated the two and got Yorik talking.
“So why the change of heart? You refused my offer just a few days ago. Now all of a sudden you want to take me up on it. What gives?”
Yorik looked uncomfortable.
“Yorik just realized what a wise and talented leader the strong elf male called ‘Theo’ is. Normally elf men are soft and weak like little girls, but not Theo! Yorik thought about this and realized Theo would make a grand chief, destined for countless conquest and a grand harem of countless females...” Yorik continued on with more shameless flattery, and the more I heard the more suspicious I became.
My eyes scanned over Yorik’s form. It was obvious that she was looking worse for wear. Her clothes were worn, and one shoe was missing its sole. There was a bandage on her left leg. Bits of thorns were still stuck in her clothes, and there were scrapes on her hands and knees. Lines above her eyes indicated she’d been awake for a while.
“You’re running from something. Or someone.”
Yorik stopped her babbling immediately. Slowly and cautiously she nodded her head.
“I may be inclined to help you. But if I do I’d like to know who exactly I’d be making enemies with.”
Yorik proceeded to tell me about a cult of super-secret cloak-wearing wizards who all wore pendants with the symbol of an open eye in them. She was quite frightened of them. Apparently, they were also users of the mind magic spellhearts. And they didn’t like the fact that Yorik was stepping into their territory.
That caught my attention. I’d always liked the idea of having the power for mind control at my disposal. It could make so many hairy situations go by smoothly, as the situation back in Queenshold proved.
“How many of these guys are there? And how much firepower can they bring to the table? What magic are they wieldi
ng?”
“Only mind magic, oh great chief! Yorik has only fought one of them. But she has a mind spellheart five times the size of mine! The tricky elves do not fight fair.”
My eyes glittered. In thought I’d been quite envious of Yorik’s mind magic spellheart, diminutive and deformed as it was. A spellheart five times the size and also of the mind magic affinity seemed very attractive.
“Alright. Maybe I can do something. I’ll lend you a hand.”
Yorik’s face lit up. “Hail, chief Theo! May his reign be long and glorious! May his axe always be wet with the blood of his foes and his bed always warm with his concubines!”
“Alright, easy there. Here’s the plan.”
I was feeling confident thanks to the fact that I had for some reason proved immune to mind magic. That was something that I could certainly use to my advantage. More than that though, I was kind of getting the feeling that I was strong in this world. Way stronger than I had any right to be. Every day I spent ingesting the zeal that naturally permeated this world my physical body grew more powerful. I was confident that if I had run into Sava at this point I would have been much tougher for her to catch.
Congratulations! Your bond with your spellheart has allowed you to begin the path of cultivation! Because of the work you’ve done, you can skip right over the first level of the zeal accumulation and enter the second level!
500 points have been awarded!
I could feel my body shift and change as it attuned itself further to the power of the spellheart in my hand. Earth magic would come easier to me now and I would be stronger with it. I immediately tried using the scanner on myself and was met with a satisfying message.
Theodore Waltz (Level 2)
Human male. Chaka and magical mason.
The nest thing I did was purchase the next level of the scanner using my newfound stash of points.
Upgrade Scanner to level 3 [400 points]
Even at level 3, Mac’s voice did not appear in my head again. Now that I was free to roam around, I needed to start trekking up the creek and see how long it would take for me to get into contact with him again. In the meantime, I did my best to convince Sava to help Yorik with me.
Zeal of the Mind and Flesh Page 16