Greed God chapter 117

February 20th 2016 Gemworld 10:00 AM EDT

I  awoke feeling...full. Not of food, but of power. Every inch of me was  humming with it. Originally I'd felt the energy in me as a constant  buzz, I could feel I had the power and stamina under my skin, but mostly  as it refilled once I was done with it. Especially after a few days  getting used to it. This was...different. I was buzzing, every cell  overflowing, my entire body nearly shaking with the earthshattering  power inside of me.

I closed my eyes and took a deep  breath, doing my best to understand what I was feeling. It took my a  moment to puzzle it out. Lifestorm. Before, my bloodline had two  elements, life and the storm. The lifestorm bloodline had been from a  powerful creature with strong life force and control of storms. This  though. This wasn't like that. I wasn't a vital creature who controlled  the storm. There was a storm OF life inside me. The riot of power and  vitality was different than before. More refined.

I let  the lightning play over me, tapping into the storm as I watched the  lightning play over me, my mantle of raiden having changed as the input  shifted. The lightning that rolled across my skin, even outside my  shifted form, wasn't blue anymore. It was green. It wasn't electricity,  not really. It was LIFE. This was a storm of vitality roaring through  me, a hurricane of pure creation and existence. It was intoxicating. I  wasn't even really a person anymore. I was a force of nature, I was  lightning in a very sexy bottle.

I dove into the water,  scything through it with ease, me limbs propelling me forward as fast as  I could think, my body moving like some sort manifestation of thought  made into flesh. I shot out of the water, and reached out with the storm  inside me, green gales catching me in the air to allow me to float  slowly to the ground. I felt like a fucking god. I turned around,  looking at the pond at an angle to catch sight of my silhouette. Once I  could see my basic shape I used appraise on it.

[Appraisal function activated. Treasure detected. Nicholas  Lord- E ranked Dragonkin of the Vital Tempest. The possessor of the  Greed System, and a recently transformed dragonkin. A distant child of a  force of nature. An echo of a great song. Primordial might and a  wellspring of life rage inside of a scion of the great beasts.]

Well.  That was pretty much the opposite of helpful. I mean, it was cool as  shit, but it also wasn't exactly an instruction manual. Actually,  thinking back, none of the appraisals I'd done on myself had actually  told me much about myself at all. Which was...odd. I got descriptions of  race upgrades and powers but no actual information about me as a  person. Not about my past, or my present, or even about what I planned  to do. I stared at the moving water hard, the reflection too shaky to be  visible to me.

After a few minutes of no reaction I  turned away. "Crassus." I didn't bother to keep my voice low. I was  alone, and I knew if I put this off I would forget about it. "How come  when I appraise myself it only gives me information as it pertains to my  ranking. Nothing specific about me?" I didn't like that now that I'd  noticed it. It felt like a portent. Like I was missing something big.

[Couldn't  tell you kid. I couldn't do it either. I suspect it's the system's way  of protecting itself from being appraised. Since it's a part of you it  makes it impossible to find out details about you. Any information might  lead to more information about what it is and how it effects you, which  doesn't really play into its goals.]

I didn't  enjoy the sound of that. " I assume you still can't tell me any more  about these goals? You can't give me some kind of hint about exactly why  I need to do the things I do? Because I'm getting a bit sick of being  jerked around. The system has been playing in my head quite a bit  recently. I know that the things it does aren't really malicious, but  it's still not a feeling I enjoy."

[You don't  enjoy gravity either. Doesn't mean you flap your arms and fly away. The  system isn't some insidious entity you have to fight. It's a force of  nature. A law of reality, it just happens to be one that only applies to  you. Stop asking questions you can't have answers to and enjoy your new  power. If it helps, the Greed System can't unmerge things. This is your  power. Forever. It isn't part of the system. It's part of you.]

Oddly  that DID help. The thought that the system could yank my leash and  render me powerless was terrifying. But Crassus was right. I couldn't  change this, and the system had been in my life for quite a while. The  issue would keep. For now I needed to get acclimated to my new  abilities. I was out in the wild in a new world. Still, it was nice that  I was an actual dragonkin now. I could feel the difference between  being dragonkin and being wyrmkin. I was so much...more than I had been  before.

I reached for the part of me that would allow me  to transform. Instead of shifting into the form I'd had before, I felt  that part of me more as a spectrum. I could have that partial shift  again, my claws and horns emerging, or I could take it further. I  shifted myself completely into the bestial part of my nature, letting it  roll over me, and I saw the scales that had covered my arms before  spread across my whole body. Or at least similar scales. They covered  all of me, and aside from the horns I felt my mouth lengthen and my  teeth sharpen as my face took on a draconic cast.

The new  scales, as I'd noted when they spread, were different. Rather than flat  green they were a shimmering iridescent emerald, that shifted to azure  as I moved. The scales were thinner and smaller, stacked across each  other to allow seamless movement. They were as thin as a fairy wing, but  I could feel how much stronger they were than the ones I'd had before,  and the mantle of raiden sparked and surged through the surface,  reinforcing me further as I fed off the life energy infusing my body, a  kind of lightning that was also vitality bridging the gap between the  two.

My horns also seemed thicker and wrapped further  back, protecting more of my head, and my claws were sharper now, wings  stretching out behind me. I was pretty sure the combination with the  wind ability I'd used earlier would make flying a snap. I stalked across  the clearing, reveling in the graceful prowl of this form. My perfect  bodily control was still present as a dragonkin, but controlling a human  body and controlling this one were leagues apart in terms of  adaptability and complexity.

Aside from the power in my  frame, my body was just qualitatively superior. My muscles had more give  to them and the material they were made of seemed to possess more  potential energy, increasing my power when they snapped taught. My  joints were more flexible and I could move my body in ways that wouldn't  have been possible as a human, almost like every joint was a ball and  socket, and I had WAY more of them now. The difference between my  current body and my old one was like the difference between driving an  old clunker I got at a scrap yard and driving a formula one stock car.

As  I approached one of the trees I launched myself at it, funneling as  much force as I could muster into the attack as I whirled off my back  foot to slam a kick into the trunk. My shin smashed into the wood, full  on snapping the tree in half from the force, with my scales and mantle  working together to absorb the impact and leave my leg completely  untouched. I hadn't even felt the hit, despite striking one of the many H  rank trees peppering this forest. I landed lightly on my feet after the  strike, bouncing up on my toes and luxuriating in the feel of all this  power.

I let the dragonkin transformation melt away, my  body flowing back into its human state, and while it was still much  stronger than it had been before I felt..confined now. Like I was a  prisoner in my own flesh. I shook off the impression, knowing it was  just an adjustment period from a downgrade, but still, I could see being  dragonkin like that being addictive if I wasn't careful.

My  battle form wasn't my only ability though, I could tap into that vital  storm inside me at any time. I was curious to see what I could do with  that. I approached the broken tree slowly, interested in testing out  what effect all that life force could have on a living thing if I used  it to infuse directly. I picked up the top half of the tree, throwing it  to one side with ease that honestly made me a bit giddy, and frowned  down at the stump, curious about how I should do the next part. I wasn't  sure if it was purely based on intent or if there was some trick to it.

With  an internal shrug I knelt and put a hand against the side of the tree,  and then I called to the storm inside me, letting it spill out past my  skin and down my hand. The green lightning flickered over me and into  the tree stump, but it didn't burn or wilt. The stump started to glow  slightly in the shadow of the nearby trees, and as I continued pouring  in my energy the glow deepened. The tree stump drank in my power, and  slowly, as I watched, something new began to happen to the stump.

In  the middle of the broken stump, a single bud poked out. As I watched,  the bud began to expand, growing bigger and thicker and before long the  tree stump shattered as a new tree shoved it out of the way to make room  for its growth. I sat there, in awe of the process, and continued  pouring out power into the stump as it grew. It wasn't fast, at least  not in terms of time spent, but for a tree growing it might as well have  been supersonic. It was like I was watching a fast forwarded time lapse  video of a growing plant.

It  took about ten or fifteen minutes to completely grow the tree, and when  it was done I realized the storm in my skin had quieted slightly. It  wasn't gone by any means, but it apparently wasn't infinite. I did still  have limits, they were just MUCH larger than they had been. That made  sense given the qualitative difference between ranks that I'd noticed. I  slumped down on my ass, staring up at this new natural feature with a  huge grin. In less than twenty minutes I'd destroyed and regrown an  entire H ranked tree.

It  took me about ten minutes for the storm inside me to get back up to  full strength. I had plenty of energy to leave before then, but I wasn't  in a rush. I could relax and see what my limits were before I left.  Once I mapped that out I hopped to my feet, found my heading again, and  started on my way. I knew there were threats out there still, but I was  pretty sure I could handle myself better now than I ever could have  before. I couldn't wait to get to Amethyst and look around. Maybe I  could even get into some trouble before my meeting was set. I always  loved getting into trouble.