Savage Awakening 549. A Chill, Ancient Night

Zane still got the sense that this Kain fellow was suspicious of him. Every so often, he’d send Zane a frown from across the Valley.

The fellow gave fewer frowns as the day progressed. They ended up mostly doing their own thing after all. That first day passed without much incident.

For his part, Zane really didn’t mind one way or another. At first, he was a bit miffed, but it wasn’t long before he immersed himself in crystal studying again.

It soon grew quite clear just how rare this starfield was.

The thing about normal flames, or even Stormfire, was that they’d hold still for you to study them. But Starfire acted much more like light. It didn’t want to stay by nature. It was an ambitious element. It wanted to go infinite, to beam out to the horizon, always.

Freezing it in a crystal, like this, was pretty much the only way it’d hold still. The only other place you’d find this pure a Starfire, as far as Zane was aware, was deep in the heart of ancient stars, which would be pretty difficult to observe up close.

That first day, he mostly just tried to get a sense of how Starfire felt, intuitively. Get that ‘light’ feeling in his mind. That sense of weightless speed. It’d be pretty interesting trying to apply that to heavy smashes, he felt. It’d probably also give his smashes a great deal more oomph. This Starfire was noticeably more explosive than his current Red Giant.

Good stuff.

Six hours passed like this, and when he opened his eyes again, he felt a bone-deep but quite pleasurable exhaustion. The exhaustion of having done a good day’s work; an exhaustion of the soul, not the body. He did also quite like alternating between stretches of pushing his physique to the limit and pushing his soul to the limit. It felt more efficient than doing both at the same time.

He found Kain had already left by the time he opened his eyes. He didn’t have any particularly strong feelings on the matter.

He looked around and saw the crystals were starting to dim, their Law strength ebbing. The cracks that riddled the ground—riddled every patch of ground here in the Pure Yang Land, even the mountains—were dimming too… he figured it was time to wrap up for the day and find a place to pitch his ladder.

The cracks stayed dimmed the next several hours. Without a sun here, this seemed to make the ‘day-night’ cycle. He wasn’t sure when the light would start back up again. Hopefully not too long.

He leaned his ladder against a chunky enough-looking rock. Then he started climbing—sure enough, a hole popped up at the top through which he could see the complex Reina had stocked for him. It had a little study, a comfy hearth with a rug made of moon yak wool, a giant sofa, and a king-sized bed. There was also an endless cabinet of snacks and foodstuffs, and another endless cabinet with various emergency necessities. 

There he spent the next few hours. He journaled a bit just to pass the time. It was always nice to try new things. He wrote down some things he might write to Reina; she would like to hear her ladder was holding up quite well. He munched on one of Evan’s cookies. He put into words the insights he’d gathered from the day’s work, though he wasn’t sure how helpful it’d be—it felt like the kind of thing he’d write but not really review very often. Still, he did enjoy the novelty of it.

After a few hours, he poked his head out and found it was still dark. The starfield still felt pretty dormant there in the distance, like it was recharging. He got the sense it was something like 1 a.m. in this world, give or take. He had a few more hours to burn.

So, he headed down the slope and started practicing his new Slash skill. Pretty much every giant boulder he saw, he slashed. The meteors were constant, and they always left new rocks, including new Astroliths. He found slashing them quite helpful in helping him hammer out the kinks.

Now he’d gotten the ‘storm’ up and running, so to speak, the next step was to make that second Slash. It was 99% bigger, not just 99% stronger—but the actual area his slash would travel was nearly the same.

It was just that the effect of the slash would be quite different, exaggerated. An arc of angry light fanning out from his Axe and carving into whatever he wished. At first, it felt a little awkward, trying to juggle the storm within with the slash going out.

Right now, whenever he tried to make that second slash, he kept losing his handle on the storm. It was almost like he’d ‘opened the door’ to the outside world, and the moment all that pent-up energy could escape, it did, all at once. Only a fraction of the firepower went into his slash. It left him with a stronger second slash, but all his momentum was lost. Not really what he was looking for.

After a few hours, he felt he was pretty close to wrangling things, but his attempts to learn the skill were starting to interfere with his soul recovery. So he called it a day on that too.

Most days, he liked to sleep a few hours. It was good to clear his mind, and it was more for the soul than the body, usually. But he didn’t mind going days without sleeping, and today he was feeling particularly excited. There was just so much to work on, and it did have that new-adventure feel still.

So he spent a few hours of the night just relaxing, exploring the place a bit. Some commotion down in the valley below soon caught his eye. Just where the campgrounds were.

The neat thing about the campgrounds was that they were all nicely color-coded. And since the powerhouses came from quite separate backgrounds, with pretty distinct powersets, it also wasn’t hard to tell who was throwing what. The pyro-necromancers, for instance, always had skullfire streams that looked like little wispy dots from a distance. The phoenixes threw feather-storms that looked like golden rain.

He actually found it quite entertaining. The black dragon campgrounds were slowly growing. The phoenixes seemed to have joined the dragons too, by how their camps were welded together now. The phoenixes seemed to be supporting the dragons, as far as he gathered—the two biggest beast tribes ganging up on everyone else.

It seemed to just about be over. The beasts would rule all. But there was a shocking twist about six hours in. There was a flurry of silver action on the dragons’ rear—the rocs seemed to have betrayed the dragons. At least, there was some kind of skirmish on their border. There was some kind of low-level aerial fight going on; they couldn’t go too high since they’d run into too many embers.

Then a vast, black, smoldering dragon universe descended over it all. Zane figured it had to be a T1 or a T2 stepping in. That stomped the rocs pretty quickly. But the kerfuffle seemed to have stopped the dragons’ advancements, at least for one night.

The humans still looked to be in ragged shape, though, and he’d bet the dragons would try again before long.  

Zane rooted for the humans, of course. Mostly for the coalition loose cultivators, which mostly consisted of smaller, less well-funded sects. He chose a plucky group of axe-wielders—their flag was a stone axe, anyway. They held strong against the dragons’ advancements, and he liked their simple but stalwart ways. 

He liked to think they were simple and stalwart, anyway. He didn’t know very much about them other than their insignia, but he didn’t mind inventing a fun storyline to entertain himself.

He was a bit of two minds about the situation. On the one hand, he did find it nice not to be too involved for once—just watch it from a distance and unwind. On the other, watching all that back-and-forth did get him a bit fired up. There was some part of him that did want to make his way down there and figure out what was going on. Maybe see if he could join the fight.

…He couldn’t let himself get derailed already. It was just the first night.

Luckily, he didn’t end up having to do anything. Another human contingent arrived at dawn’s break, to the relief of the non-dragon coalition. The dragons, realizing they couldn’t just take over anymore, seemed to have settled into some grudging peace.

Zane would keep an eye on the situation. He identified as a Stone Axe-Sect fan.

One other fascinating thing about how these folk fought. Flying swords were out of fashion in Zane’s time, but they seemed to be cutting-edge in ancient times. Half the strongest humans zipped around on one, even if they weren’t sword wielders. Maybe movement Skills weren’t as advanced yet?

Their weapons and armor were pretty simple too, mostly bronze, stone, and obsidian as far as he could tell. That wasn’t to say they were necessarily weak. He’d seen some of the highest-grade bronze he’d ever seen down there in the human sects’ camp. The poorer sects, the loose cultivators, mostly wielded stone implements, just very high-grade stone. Even the runes on their tents were crude. They even looked like they were drawn by cavemen. Next to them, the ones on the ladder Reina had given him looked like futuristic tech.

After observing for a bit, he found several of the folks’ techniques looked like ones he still saw in use today, which was a bit surprising. Although he supposed there were only so many ways you could throw out a giant ice blast. Only whereas in modern times, for instance, when he saw someone like Vanessa Volkova summon a bunch of icicles, all the essence flows and summoning patterns were very well understood and optimized by countless Sages, iterating over and over. The folks down there looked to be chucking up ice shards and hoping for the best. He had to admit it looked a bit cruder.

Taken together, it definitely had its own kind of old-timey charm.

Toward the end of the night, he saw his first Destruction meteor. It landed so close to him it nearly struck him.

He just had to leap out of the way, let it smash into a sleeping Astrolith, instantly destroying it, before leaving behind its prize: a Shard of Destruction.

He headed over, snatched it up, and pocketed it. It was the easiest Shard he’d gotten in his life. That was two in the tank for whenever he broke through to True God.

By then, the cracks were brightening, this world’s equivalent of dawn.

It was time to get back to work.