Tier 3+ - Accidental Champion (Book 7) - Chapter 8 - Primal Predator

Once Xavier had successfully drawn and initiated the Willpower Infusion spell pattern, he felt like a new man.

After all the pain he’d gone through getting back to this point, after finding every part of him shattered, having to rebuild himself from a starting point that was less than zero, it was invigorating to discover not everything had been damaged.

When he first used the Willpower Infusion spell pattern in that clearing, finding that not only had his control not diminished, but had drastically improved, he quickly worried that he was mistaken.

Perhaps it only felt so much stronger because everything else felt so weak.

He commanded the mind-controlled Level 8 Metal Tusked Boar to flee. Killing the beast wouldn’t gain him anything, and doing so would be wasteful and unnecessarily cruel.

As it ran through the forest as fast as its weak body could take it, Xavier examined his memories.

With great effort, the central room within his mind had been rebuilt. He stood within it with his mental apparition—the apparition feeling more solid than it ever had before—and called forth his memories of the last time he’d used the Willpower Infusion spell pattern.

His memory was still perfect, assuming he wished to actively recall something, and he was able to observe the level of control side by side with his previous level.

A smile slipped onto his face. He hadn’t been wrong. His control over spell patterns had improved.

Not only had it improved, it had improved tenfold.

Xavier was blown away. He replayed the memories over and over, reexperiencing the sensations. He hadn’t missed anything, yet he felt compelled to keep checking.

He shook his head in disbelief. If he were to compare his control over this spell pattern with his previous control of the spell itself, his control of the pattern would be better. Much better.

How? How did this happen?

It wasn’t that he was disappointed—he couldn’t be more thrilled! The surprise simply shocked him. In that central room, he sunk to the floor and frowned. He’d fully expected his control over spell patterns to not only be weaker, but non-existent.

Even so, logic had told him that he should be able to use them, and that was why he had tried, but this?

The only reason he could think of that his control was stronger was because of what he’d been through. He didn’t like thinking of that time, when he’d been within the time dilation field, activating those three hundred spell patterns. The pressure, the pain—to call it overwhelming would be an understatement.

But perhaps that experience, that pressure, had hardened him…

Even as it broke every other part of me.

Xavier came out of that central room feeling different. Feeling in control. That inner calm he’d been strengthening was at its peak. Since he’d started making progress rebuilding himself and found that his foundation wasn’t simply being put back in place, but was slowly becoming stronger than it had been, he’d still wished that it hadn’t happened.

It wasn’t something he could change. He couldn’t turn back time. But as much as he tried to let go of the regret he felt, as much as he pushed it down, it still lingered.

How could it not?

He had simply stopped letting it affect his actions.

Now, however, he was beginning to wonder if what had happened to him might actually be a good thing. Not just because adversity bred strength, but because his control was ten times better.

Xavier drew in a long breath, then slowly exhaled. Brandishing his soul bound weapon in the form of a stylus, he funnelled Celestial Energy into it and stepped forward.

It was time for him to draw another spell pattern.

~

Xavier sat, cross-legged inside the forest clearing near Collinsville. At the edge of the clearing was a transparent barrier, a barrier that of everyone on the planet Earth, only he could see. Around him, the air was still. The knee-high grass did not sway, and all was silent but for his breath.

Outside the barrier, the trees were utterly still, their branches frozen where the wind had bent them. Above the clearing, through the gap in the canopy, the sun hung heavy in the sky.

From Xavier’s perspective, it had not moved for months.

The moment Xavier had discovered he could not only draw but control spell patterns once more, he’d drawn another. The second pattern that he’d drawn was one he hadn’t used before.

It was the pattern for Time Alteration.

Though Xavier hadn’t drawn it before, and he currently lacked access to the room in his mind where the spell was held, he knew the complex runes that made up its whole by heart.

It was the very first spell pattern he’d examined.

Even without being able to access that room within his mind, just the fact that he’d glimpsed the pattern would mean he could retrieve his memory of it.

Drawing the pattern to perfection for the first time had taken only three days in his universe’s time. Once the pattern was complete and glowed with its brilliant white light, he’d initiated it.

Just as his control over the Willpower Infusion pattern had been stronger than he’d imagined, so was his control over the Time Alteration pattern, to the point where he was sure that he could hold the time dilation field in its current figuration for a year if he needed to.

Even after several months had already passed.

No. Longer… Maybe a lot longer…

Time for the young dragonkin had once again lost much of its meaning.

In his silent seclusion within that clearing, he continued to rebuild himself. Celestial Energy coursed through every channel within his body, and those channels that had been so thin when he’d first set foot in this clearing with his old party were now thicker than they’d been before his cores had been shattered. The strength of his cultivation, too, had improved.

Cultivating energy inside a time dilation field required different skills than cultivating it outside of one. It didn’t take long for him to exhaust the ambient Celestial Energy that hung in the air in the area immediately around him. He’d had to push his awareness farther and farther outward, drawing in energy from outside the field.

This was something that felt as though it should be impossible with time moving so slowly, but he quickly discovered Celestial Energy wasn’t hindered by the natural laws. It could move faster than the speed of light. Drawing it in appeared only limited by one’s ability to stretch their awareness—and Xavier was now able to stretch his spiritual awareness far farther than ever before.

Something strange had happened as he’d pumped Celestial Energy through his channels, making them thicker and thicker, stronger and stronger.

Stronger than before.

Pain had plagued him each time he’d stretched the channels wider—though that was not what had been strange. He’d experienced that pain when Justin had first fed Celestial Energy into him. Though it was unusual, for that pain had never plagued him in the past when his energy channels had improved. He chalked that up to the damage he had done to himself.

No, it was when he’d seemed to hit the peak of how much Celestial Energy his body could hold and focused purely on cycling that energy through his channels in different patterns, while also pooling it in different parts of his body—a process he needed to do, if he was ever to regain the ability to use Body Cultivation as he had before—when the strange thing had happened.

As his spiritual sense had strengthened along with his ability to cultivate and cycle Celestial Energy, he’d sensed something inside him. Multiple somethings. Small, aberrant things his sense recoiled from. Though he couldn’t use his spiritual sense to smell, the only way he knew how to explain the sensation was that these things reeked.

It was a natural, primitive reaction, the same way rotten things smelled terrible to prevent people from going near them and contracting disease.

It wasn’t long after he’d identified these aberrant, strange things that permeated not only his energy channels, but his bones, muscles, organs, and even his skin—they were everywhere inside of him—that he learnt he could use Celestial Energy to manipulate them.

Without knowing what they were, for Bones knew nothing of them, and Xavier was not yet willing to use Otherworldly Communion to ask for advice now that he had found a path to strength and had an almost unlimited time in which to pursue that path, Xavier worked on removing them himself.

Bones had implored him only once to seek help, before Xavier shut the soul bound weapon down. Xavier wasn’t against finding help. He’d tried to find help for this and failed. Twice. He’d put aside his pride when he’d tried to return to the tavern at the bottom of the tower to speak to Adranial. Xavier did not believe it was pride that made him abstain from drawing the Otherworldly Communion spell pattern to summon a spirit for guidance on this—it was the fact that he’d done so many impossible things, he did not wish for yet another person to tell him he was trying to do something that couldn’t be done.

Xavier didn’t think of himself as a genius, at all. In the books he’d read since entering the Greater Universe, there had been many stories about geniuses—the main characters from He Who Fights With Beasts and Primal Predator were called geniuses.

No, he wasn’t a genius. He felt more like he bumbled through all the challenges he came upon, doing the best he could, making it through by a mix of luck and sheer determination. But he did know that geniuses, the ones he’d read about, tended to do things in unorthodox ways, rather than going with the conventional methods—and that was what got them so much farther than everyone else.

As Xavier was no genius, he worried that simply being aware of the conventional methods would slow him down or stall him completely from making the breakthroughs he needed. Had he known he “couldn’t” discover his Spirit Core at such a low level, he doubted he would have. Had he known he “couldn’t” defeat enemies two grades higher than him, or use spell patterns, or use those very patterns to permanently learn any spell he came upon…

Well, he wouldn’t be where he was.

His process was fraught with danger and could very well be the thing slowing him down right now, but he also knew he wouldn’t have gotten this far had he been following the advice of a stronger, older mentor.

He would have made the standard choices, and that would have kept him back.

So when he found this aberrant things in his body and learnt how to move them, he focused on expelling them. A voice or two in his mind warned him this might not be safe. That these things could be vital. That he should do some research before making such a rash move.

What if he damaged himself again? What if something worse happened, and he got himself killed?

Xavier ignored those voices. Nothing that felt how these things felt could be good for him.

So, he used Celestial Energy to push these things to the surface of his skin, through the very pores that energy entered and exited his body. Now that he’d strengthened both his energy channels and his pores, they were large enough that these things were able to fit through them.

The first time he’d pushed one of them out he’d seen a tar-like black substance pour out of his forearm. It wasn’t a large amount—only the size of a pea—but the smell as it was released into the air knocked him out of his concentration and made him reel, falling to his back where he’d been sitting.

“God, that stinks.”

Xavier squeezed his nose shut, his fingers like a vice. Still, the smell persisted. His spiritual sense had been right—whatever this was, it reeked.

Once he’d settled himself and done his best to compartmentalise his sense of smell from the rest of him, he’d looked at the substance again with a tilt of his head.

“This was inside me?”

The very thought disgusted him, especially when he knew this was only a small portion of what he’d found. In all his time in the Greater Universe, he’d never read of anything like this before.

Yet somehow, it felt… familiar.

Xavier closed his eyes and focused, drawing on his memories. Not for the first time, there was a part of him that wished he could remember everything all at once, instead of having to drag it out from the depths of his mind. Though he imagined such a feeling would be overwhelming.

Maybe that is something I will gain in the future, at a time when my mind is powerful enough that it wouldn’t overwhelm me.

As he focused, Xavier split his mind into multiple parts, each of them searching for references to what he was looking for. There was something the older version of him had said—the oldest version, and first other version of himself that he’d encountered—about Zen masters using qi before Earth’s integration…

But that wasn’t what he was looking for, though it helped him narrow it down.

Xavier pulled out memories from before he was a part of the Greater Universe. Much of what he’d read before being integrated had been science fiction and fantasy novels. Mostly space opera and epic fantasy. But he distinctly remembered reading something a classmate had recommended him—a series called Cradle by Will Wight.

At the time, Xavier had read the entire series in a flash, consuming the books faster than anything he’d read in the past. Back then, he’d never been the fastest reader, and yet he’d managed to devour a twelve-book series in two weeks.

He’d also read them so rapidly that he hadn’t given them much thought after he’d finished them. He’d enjoyed them, and they’d been good, but he’d quickly returned to the other fantasy books awaiting him on his list and hadn’t thought of those books since—almost as though they’d been blocked from his memory somehow.

That made him frown as he opened his eyes.

He didn’t actually think they had been blocked, but it did feel strange to him that he’d never given them thought until now, as what he’d been doing with the energy he cycled through his body, his cores, all of it—it had all been a part of the magic system in that series.

Then again, why would he have need to think through all of the different books he’d read once he’d entered the System, other than for leisure? The universe he discovered there bore little relation to the reality he’d thought he’d lived within. What wisdom could be found in his past? In fiction, of all things?

Cultivation novels…

Dredging through his memories he realised he’d heard of them—stories inspired by Daoism and Chinese mythology—but that Cradle, written by an American, was the only such series he’d read. As he hadn’t tried to directly recall the memories, they hadn’t been available to him. It was a flaw in the way his “perfect” memory worked that made him wonder what other bits of information might be stuck somewhere in his mind.

The very process that he just went through, pushing that tar-like substance out of his body, had been mentioned in that book. It had been an automatic process spurred by advancement.

Advancement. Cultivation. Qi. These ideas have already been around in Earth culture long before the System came…

Except, Xavier had advanced several times before and nothing like this had ever happened to him. Bones, too, hadn’t heard of this, and he’d been far more worldly in life than Xavier. Even Rhaalir, who he called into the time dilation field to speak with on this, knew nothing of the process.

And yet people on Earth knew of this?

He added that to the list of very strange things he one day wished to find the truth of. Earth didn’t only know about that, either. There were myths about elves, dwarfs, orcs, gnomes, golems, dragons, mages—all manner of things that were found in the Greater Universe, but to his knowledge and the knowledge of everyone on Earth, had only ever been myths, legends, and stories.

Never something real.

And yet it was all more real than anyone could have ever imagined.

Xavier stopped himself from getting too sidetracked, focusing on what was before him, and finally finding a name for that black sludge that he’d forcefully removed from his body.

Impurities.

Perhaps it was foolish to go by the fiction of his home planet, rather than seek out guidance through Otherworldly Communion, but Xavier knew in his soul that right now he was walking down the right path.

Another path to power.