Path of Dragons - A LitRPG Apocalypse (BOOK TWO STUBBING AUGUST 15)-11-79. Lindwyrm
Elijah let out an agonized scream as a shockwave slammed into him. The air left his lungs, and he went soaring through the air. His flight only lasted a moment before he hit something solid. That was when his wits came back to him, and he remembered everything that had happened. The core cultivation. The Worldseed. The Rite of Heritage.
And the horde of dragons, wasps, and abyssal monsters rabidly clawing at the planetary core that no longer existed.
The second those memories came back, Elijah was treated to a notification that he quickly dismissed. Before it disappeared from his inner field of vision, he managed to read the short system message:
You have acquired the Worldseed. To conquer the Broken Crown, you have three options.
1.
Surrender it to the dragon forces.
2.
Surrender it to the vespiran forces.
3.
Escape the Primal Realm.
Even though Elijah only gave it a cursory glance, that brief look gave him some insight into how the Primal Realm was supposed to go. And it definitely didn’t include him absorbing the Worldseed, meaning that the first two options were absolutely unavailable to him. He had no choice but to escape.
After all, it wasn’t as if he could simply tear the Worldseed from his core.
Those thoughts only lasted a second before he caromed off of what turned out to be an abyssal monster, hit a dragon, then tumbled, end over end, across the closest landmass. He didn’t come to a stop for nearly thirty seconds, and by that point, he’d nearly reached the edge of the relatively small hunk of rock.
Even so, he was thrown more than a dozen miles away. The shockwave as well as the impact broke a few bones, but not nearly as many as he would have expected. And it only took a quick multi-cast of Wild Resurgence and Nature’s Bloom to mend the damage.
Which was quite a surprise. Given how far he’d been thrown, the explosion must have been on par with a nuclear blast. With his constitution, survival wasn’t really shocking, but the relative lack of damage was.
That was when he put two and two together.
Once, Kirlissa had told him that reaching the fourth stage of core cultivation meant that he would achieve status as a true dragon. At the time, he’d thought it was more of a cultural designation than something concrete. But as he picked himself up, Elijah realized that it was a much more impactful distinction than he could’ve realized.
He felt stronger, and he was obviously more durable. His healing spells hit a lot harder, too. In fact, if he didn’t know better, he would have likened what he felt to what he’d been led to expect from reaching demi-god status.
It went further than that, though Elijah didn’t have time to truly investigate the changes he’d undergone. Not with thousands of abyssals, dragons, and wasps bearing down on him. They’d resisted the explosion, but they could clearly sense that he had what they wanted.
And they seemed perfectly willing to rip it out of him.
Elijah fled, and not a moment too soon. A dragon landed a second later, his wings outstretched and his eyes burning with ravenous consumption. His demeanor was reminiscent of the wild dragon Elijah had defeated in the Rite of Heritage, though he seemed even less controlled, if that was possible.
The creature snapped out in an attempt to swallow Elijah whole, but he dove to the side, rolling back to his feet nearly thirty feet later. Already, he’d cast Shape of the Sky, and his body transformed in less than a second. He leaped, furiously flapping his wings to gain altitude.
The orange-scaled dragon followed.
And in his wake came a hundred others. They weren’t as powerful, but they were just as furious. Vespirans flew right beside them, filling the air with the rapid, low-pitched thump of their wings.
The abyssals leaped, high and fast, though Elijah quickly outpaced them. They plummeted to the ground, the piercing scream of thousands of faces forming a horrifying chorus with the sound of so many wasp wings beating against the atmosphere.
Elijah banked, avoiding a stream of orange fire, then dipped to dodge an incoming vespiran stinger. His talons lashed out, ripping the creature’s wings asunder, and he watched as it fell in a lopsided, spiraling descent that ended in a massive crash. An opportunistic abyssal wrapped its tentacles around the fallen wasp-man, shoving the unfortunate creature into its maw without missing a stride.
A gruesome fate, and one that managed to snap the vespiran out of its rabid mindset. It only lasted an instant before it was consumed.
Elijah didn’t have time for pity, though. Especially not for the hated ancestral enemy of dragons. Instead, he had his talons full just avoiding being ripped to shreds, pierced by a hundred stingers, or roasted alive by dragon’s breath.
He dipped and dove, climbed and banked, always a little ahead of the latest attack. It was like he’d gained a few hundred attribute points in one go. He felt stronger and more coordinated than ever before. If he’d been on the verge of meeting the demi-gods on even footing, he now found himself standing toe-to-toe with them.
It would have been a heady feeling if he wasn’t so busy fleeing for his life.
Because fighting one or two demi-gods might have been possible, but battling against a hundred of them – all of whom wanted to rip him to pieces – was impossible. The only answer was flight.
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Thankfully, Elijah had a bit of a head start.
He rocketed toward the chain, noticing that it was even more degraded than ever. A few of the links had already broken, and it was held together by only a couple of rusty links toward the center.
Elijah dipped low, then climbed the chain. He pushed himself to maximum velocity, narrowly outpacing the orange dragon. Thankfully, the Red Tyrant’s protective shield still sheathed the chain, keeping the abyss at bay.
He broke free of the chain after only a handful of minutes – quite a pace, considering that he’d previously estimated the chain to span more than sixty miles, which put his speed at almost a thousand miles an hour. Every passing second saw the dragon losing ground. He simply couldn’t keep up.
When Elijah saw the next landmass, he very nearly missed a beat of his wings. Tens of thousands of creatures. Abyssals, dragons, wasps – even a few massive spiders – crawled all over one another in an attempt to reach him.
Elijah didn’t hesitate.
After orienting himself in roughly the right direction, he used Lightning Rush. For the next two-and-a-half seconds, he blistered across the sky as a bolt of electricity. In doing so, he reached speeds he’d never before attained, covering hundreds of miles in a single second.
Fortunately, the landmass was one of the larger ones, and the distance between the two chains spanned at least a couple thousand miles. Unfortunately, there were more than a few clumps of buildings in the way. Elijah crashed through them, leaving explosions of debris in his wake. His bones broke, and his organs ruptured, but when he returned to the Shape of the Sky, he was still mostly intact.
That drove home just how much more durable he’d become.
He’d also outpaced the horde, and though he saw more coming in the distance, he had enough room to land and enter into the Guise of the Unseen. Once he’d found an intact building, he ducked inside and, at last, allowed himself to focus on everything that had happened.
Moreover, he now had the time to look at the pair of notifications he’d received directly after awakening from his core vision. The first was unsurprising:
Congratulations! Your Dragon Core has reached the Lindwyrm Stage.
Lindwyrm. Elijah didn’t know what to make of that. He knew it was just a name, but after what he’d just experienced, the suffix left a bad taste in his mouth. He quickly moved past that and to the next notification, which he suspected explained his influx of power:
You have reached the fourth threshold. Current stage: Lord
Every time Elijah had advanced an overall stage, he’d experienced a boost in power. Until now, the biggest difference had come from the very first stage. But the advancement from Expert to Lord far outstripped what he’d felt going from Commoner to Cultivator.
Was that normal? Elijah had no idea. Probably not. But then again, he didn’t think that most people had a Worldseed fueling their core. Even though the system had stripped it of some of its power, the thing was far more potent than any natural treasure Elijah had ever felt. The fact that he’d survived contact with it was a minor miracle, and there was no way he should have been capable of absorbing it.
Did the system help him? The World Tree itself, perhaps? Or was he more special than he’d yet discovered? Kirlissa seemed to believe it was the latter, but Elijah tended to think that it was likely a combination of the three. And maybe some other factors of which he was entirely unaware.
Whatever the case, when he turned his eyes inward, he saw something truly amazing.
His entire cultivation system was connected, and more intricately than he had ever envisioned. Outwardly, it truly did resemble a tree. However, when he looked below the surface, he saw a complex web of veins that more closely resembled the human cardiovascular system. Except, even that barely scratched the surface of its complexity.
In fact, it was like he’d combined a tree’s vascular system with a human nervous and circulatory systems to create a hybrid that took the best parts of all three. Even that didn’t truly convey the scope of what he saw.
Even the branches of his soul and the sturdy trunk of his body had grown more complex and, consequently, powerful. The leaves of his mind weren’t more numerous, but they were larger, their facets sharper. And the vortexes attached to them were consequently more efficient.
Each individual part of his cultivation system had taken a giant step forward, and somehow, the improvement to the whole turned out to be even more impactful than that implied. As a result, he felt better than he ever had before. Stronger. Faster. Far more durable. And as he discovered when he settled in to heal himself, a lot easier to regenerate.
But then he felt something odd, like there was something within him clawing to get out. He focused inward, only to realize that Kirlissa’s statement about becoming a true dragon was far more literal than he could have anticipated.
His dragon form wanted to show itself.
And despite not wanting to draw attention to himself, Elijah allowed it. The transformation was both familiar and completely different than anything he’d experienced before. The method mimicked the process of shifting into one of his bestial forms, but it went far deeper than any of those spells. It also took a lot longer, and the transformation didn’t complete for almost two full minutes, though he sensed that was unique to the first time. In the future, it would be much faster.
When it completed, Elijah couldn’t help but let out a rumbling gasp at the results.
Not only had he grown almost as large as the Shape of the Sea, but if his senses were correct, he’d taken on the prototypical shape of a European-style dragon. That meant four legs. Wings. A long tail and a reptilian snout. A pair of massive antlers grew from his head, and emerald scales covered most of his body.
It should not have been surprising. Nor should it have felt so fitting. Elijah had spent his entire life as a human, but now that he’d assumed the shape of a dragon, the idea of going back left a bit of a sour taste in his mouth.
Part of that was the sheer power in his limbs. If he’d felt strong in the wake of his core’s advancement, that feeling had only intensified after taking on his true form. And it was no illusion, either. Elijah had experienced something of a dragon’s strength during his core visions, and he felt a piece of that now.
But it was also comforting on a level that should not have existed. Each time he’d gained a new form, it had taken a while for him to completely acclimate. That was not the case as a dragon.
Elijah pushed those feelings to the side and focused on the form itself. Upon closer inspection, it was not quite as prototypical as his first impression suggested. His back was absolutely covered in moss and leaves, and his wings looked more like the branches of a tree than anything else.
There was no way they could support flight.
But his instincts told him otherwise. With his bulky form, he didn’t think he’d be able to cover quite as much ground as Shape of the Sky. Maybe half speed, which meant it would be slightly faster than going on foot. But even that was a game-changer, especially considering that, as a dragon, he could cast the same spells he could in his natural form.
After finishing his inspection, Elijah used Natural Shapeshifter to once again assume his humanoid form. Even that had changed, though not nearly as much. His scales were a little more lustrous, and he’d grown slightly taller. But the biggest difference was that, with a thought, he could extend his wings.
Normally, they weren’t even visible, and in a way, they reminded Elijah of his Antlers of the Wild Revenant, which existed slightly out of phase with his reality. But once extended, he knew they were more than up to the task of granting him flight.
The question remained – if his dragon form was so powerful, then why would he ever use any other? Perhaps he wouldn’t. Maybe he’d moved past the need to shapeshift at all.
He didn’t think so, but he was learning as he went.
For now, though, he needed to finish healing, then engineer his escape from the Primal Realm. A massive earthquake sweeping through the landmass told him that he needed to get a move on, too. Because it seemed that the Broken Crown was on the verge of completely shattering.
He didn’t want to be there when the Red Tyrant’s protection faded.
11-79. Lindwyrm
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