Leaving my fortress to Hela was like having to pull a rotten tooth. In a manner of speaking, I set the date, took time off, and drove to the dentist. But when the time came, I was filled with anxiety. The second I left my fortress, my power and resources would equal my own cultivation base and inventory. Demon hosts would be a credible threat again, and we had to cross a lot of land to get to Gungale, and Bright town was even further. To make matters worse, we had a lot of soft targets.

I was also less sure that Hela had joked about being pregnant. She didn’t want to force me to stay but didn’t want me to leave and the sex. We had only done it more until I had to leave.

“Stay, and we’ll find the spirit cores you need eventually. The heroes won’t come this far, and even if they do, we’ll be together.” Hela said.

I smiled softly; we avoided this conversation. “My path leads me elsewhere. I can’t stay.” I said.

Those words sounded stronger in my head. I reached down and rubbed the tiny bump on her belly. To an average human, the tiny hard lump would have been unnoticeable. But, for someone who hadn’t touched her as much as I had, the change would be impossible to tell.

“It’s a miracle, a blessing of Sol Invictus himself. You should be proud nothing like this has ever happened.” Hela said.

Was there anything I couldn’t get pregnant if this was possible? What about Emily and Shadbak? I wanted to freak out, but the emotions didn’t come; instead, I felt pleased. Soon enough, those two would swell as well. It was in my nature.

What was wrong with me?

Even as I thought I should reject that feeling, there was emotion in me that did. The alignment of my humanity and the dragon had happened more often than I thought possible. Or perhaps this feeling was only human, and I thought the anxiety I felt was superficial. I could build a fully functional house and acquire all the food we could need in weeks. So why should I feel anxious about having a family?

This place wasn’t where I wanted to build; it was elsewhere. I wanted land where even the inquisitors would hesitate to scout but close enough to human civilization to visit.

“Mary, take care of him for me,” Hela said.

“I will love him as if he were my own stallion,” Mary said.

“Wait, what?” I asked.

I turned to Marry, and the ashen horse winked at me. That felt more unnatural to me than when they spoke. But, for some reason, I couldn’t let it go with the flow.

“You better; the only reason I’m letting him leave is because you’re going with him,” Hela said and grabbed my hand. “You’ll need someone to keep you warm on chilly nights.”

“I’m afraid you’ve skewed my definition for warm in your favor. I’ll think of you while I’m leaning against Marry.” I muttered, much to Hela’s growing smirk.

…

Once we were ready, Ser Brussel drove the wagon forward, and we left over the drawbridge. I looked back to see Hela and her knights. They still posed as immovable monoliths of ashen might. As they shrank in the distance, my link to the fortress began to stretch until I stopped Mary. The rest of the column stopped and looked back at me.

“Are you alright?” Emily asked.

“One more step, and my link to the fortress will break. All that power I built up will be gone.” I said.

For a breath, I thought furiously about going back. I would have to throw away my pride and cage myself to one place if I went back. I might never reach the next realm. Hela would be mine, and I would be there for our child. But ashen weren’t human and didn’t require the same care a human would. If anything, I might be a poor father due to my resentment of being caged. Was it worth it?

“Keep going; we don’t have time for doubts,” I said.

Mary took a step, and my link snapped. I felt my power shrink down to only myself.

…

In the junction between the ashen hills and the contested lands leading to Gungale territory, we heard pouring rain for miles before the rain came into view. The ashen horses refused to take another step forward towards the wall of water qi filled rain. Storm clouds rotated overhead, and lightning flashed, exposing the long slender bodies of dragons in the clouds. Each of them felt like the serpent in some way or another.

“We can’t go any further stepping out in that is certain death for us,” Drue said furthest from the group.

Every crackle of thunder seemed to drive the stallion further away. I stepped down from the saddle and thought about it for a second, and searched through my pockets. When I started manipulating seeds to grow to my designs, every change was a milestone. Making a wheeled track was a herculean effort.

“Well, this does seem to be a problem. Give me a few hours.” I said.

Time and practice had worked their crazy magic. But, if there was one type of qi manipulation I was good at, it was wood qi.

I fiddled with my inventory and found some seeds that looked promising. I took seeds from the same plant adapted to the ashen hills and grew them both just enough to pollinate and reproduce. Adaptations took multiple generations, and typically what I was doing would result in a more robust overall tree. The genetics to survive in Gemini Town and the Ashen hills were passed on. I fed them fire qi and soaked them in the water qi from the rain. Then I grew them just enough to reproduce and collected a new generation.

For 4 hours, we remained undisturbed while I worked. But time wasn’t on our side, and already my reserves began to plummet.

My cells had gone through a similar process when I had sex with Hela. She burned me, and I regenerated using wood qi to recover and fire qi to use the ashes from dead cells to help the process. New life grew best in the ashes of the older cycle.

“What are you doing? We aren’t in your fortress any longer; you can’t waste so much qi.” Emily said.

Her blonde hair waved in the wind and her green eyes lit by the flashes of lightning looked so sincere. She was a pure fire type, and a wall of water qi fell less than a hundred yards from us. I’m surprised she had to guts to get within a hundred yards. Type weaknesses were a thing only much less disastrous for humans.

“I have it under control. We’ll be ready in just a few more generations.” I said.

As if the heavens themselves wanted to punish me, a bolt of lightning twisted, and I pushed her out of the way.

It struck me in the chest, knocking me off my feet. The pain traveled to the fillings in my mouth down to the metal buckle at my waist. As quickly as the bolt struck, it ended. Lightning qi filled my body in vast amounts, and I didn’t have a way to cultivate it. Surprisingly in over 50 sects, there wasn’t a thing on cultivating lightning qi.

I picked myself up off the ashy ground and spat out a wad of blood. My hand flexed, and suddenly I was paralyzed worse than sleep paralysis. The lightning qi shot into my muscles when I tried to move. I needed to purge it or be stuck frozen for hours.

In the distance, a blob formed in the rain and slowly grew in visibility. Lightning crackled within the blob as it floated towards us, and dozens of spindly tentacles began to light up. It was a jellyfish, and it appeared to have two spirit cores, one blue and the other yellow. “Is that a slayer class spirit? What is it doing here?” Mary asked.

If the ashen horses looked ready to bolt before, they looked positively mutinous as the slayer approached. The creature’s power dwarfed my own and easily doubled if not tripled Emily’s nascent realm cultivation. Hundreds of electrifying tentacles appeared, each armed with spears of lightning. Unfortunately, out of the thousands of lightning spears lining its tentacles, one was missing.

The creature’s limbs reached out beyond the wall of rain and began to ooze into the territory of the ashen hills. It was colossal and buoyant, floating as if it were fully submerged. Water gathered in its massive body before squirting down below, creating a spiraling torrent that scoured the ground.

My mind flew through every formation I knew but came up empty. There wasn’t a formation in my arsenal that did anything with lightning. The lamps worked on light qi. Anything I could do with water took too much time to prepare. The response from my battle form wasn’t promising.

A flood of water qi erupted from beneath the slayer’s tentacles and flowed over the ash-covered ground turning it into a grey slurry. Emily and Marry grabbed me by my lion pelt cloak and dragged me through the ash-covered ground back towards the wagon as bolts of lightning flashed across the ground. The tide of water poured in, ignoring gravity and instead choosing to follow the creature.

When we reached the wagon, I felt something drain the lightning qi away. Suddenly, I could move, which opened up all sorts of possibilities. I turned to the source and saw purple streaks of lightning flash over Washington’s cocoon.

I decided then that the creature wasn’t coming for us; it wanted Washington. A few things happened then. First, my plants reached the right generation, and I could stand. Second, I collected ten seeds and tossed them to the ashen horses. Finally, wooden armor covered them as my plan to combat the rain came together.

My body transformed, and instead of feeling powerful, I felt endangered. The lightning qi all around us seemed deadlier, and what I was about to do all at once disgusted me and made me want to laugh out loud. Instead, I unhitched the horses from the wagon, flew up while lifting the thing overhead, and chunked it.

As the wagon slid down a hill, the tentacles lashed out, reaching for the cocoon only to miss. My transformation fell as the creature slowly turned back to us. We mounted the horses and took off as lightning crashed everywhere and the giant jellyfish closed in on us.

“We’re going to melt and die.” Marry yelled as we shot out into the rain. But, despite her feelings on the matter, she still charged into certain doom. “Cold!” Marry screamed as we rode out into the rainstorm.

The ashen didn’t flinch away from getting wet. Leaves covered the horses catching the rain before it hit; vines soaked up any remaining water while a dense layer of wood formed a shell around them. While it wasn’t perfect, it was a solid tool that helped the ashen horses cover ground in a rainstorm.

I wasn’t wearing rainproof armor. So as the water fell, I was soon soaked from head to toe, and my lion cloak weighed me down. To Marry, I might as well have been a particularly thick hat. But we weren’t out of the woods yet.

More of the massive spirit beasts or demons began to appear. While their auras were similar, they were slightly different.

Hundreds of jellyfish appeared in flashes of lightning, moving towards us with their tentacle. Long spears of lightning jutted from the tentacles like thorns on a rose vine as they reached out for us. A single sting could paralyze any of us. If we fell off our horses here, we were as good as dead, me included. The disparity of power was too great. These creatures were each stronger than the Ashen knights unarmed.

So, we rode like hellhounds were nipping at our heels and didn’t stop. We might have traveled 200 miles before the jellyfish stopped harassing us. Shadbak took us on a trail through some mountainous hills overlooking a bottom covered in farms.

We stopped our breakneck pace and slowed down enough to rest our horses. Marry wasn’t heaving for breath, but her spirit core had dimmed a great deal.

When we thought we were safe, a rockslide shot through and took one of the mares. The poor creature fell with hundreds of tons of rock down the side of a hill into a bottom. One moment she was there; the next, we were watching the rocks fall in a steady stream.

“We’ve barely begun our journey, and Cherelle is gone.” Marry said.

The rain chose that moment to die down, and the sun came out. It gave us a good look at the sizzling orange guts covering the rocks a few dozen feet down the hill. Ripped open sections of wooden armor were splintered with splotches of orange blood covering them. One of Cherelle’s legs still spasmed as it rolled downhill.

My teeth clenched tight enough to draw blood. Thunder peeled behind us, either natural or jellyfish I didn’t know.

Our ashen mounts looked to me, and I knew what to do. I’ve studied the Starlight Scripture enough to know its words. “Almighty Sol Invictus, take her spirit core into your embrace. In the halls of the worthy, let her find a new spark and live a new life sweeter than this one cut short. Have her return to us from ash into her favored form to prance under the sun and stars again.” So I said, and Marry trotted forward, taking us down the path towards Gungale.