Wraithwood Botanist

Chapter 146 - Fourth Evolution Beast

It's not an easy thing, poisoning a fourth evolution beast. In fact, it's not easy poisoning a third evolution beast or a second evolution beast because beasts have great noses—especially the supernatural beasts from Areswood Forest.

To poison a beast, you either have to stab them with the poison, soak them in it, ideally with a hurricane arrow, or mask the poison so well that even their "superhuman" (but for beasts) senses—like smell—is completely worthless. And the stronger the poison is, the more difficult this becomes.

And sometimes, even after mixing your poison with soap and squeezing it into golf ball-sized barbs to hide the smell, you're not convinced that'll work, so you do what's best instead—

Confuse the beast and try to feed it simultaneously.

How does this work?

Well, it starts with the prey—third evolution beasts.

It was confusing that I wasn't ready to fight a fourth evolution beast when I could fly around and turn third evolution beasts into mouse traps, but there we were, Kline in my arms, flying through the very top of the Fourth Ring, following Wood Wide Web, finding these beasts—a process that was quite difficult after I had culled most of the northwest population.

And for what?

Was I going to just chop up their limbs, cleanse their meat, and then throw it as an offering for a fourth evolution beast? Of course not.

That would scream trap—not confusion.

So, instead, we just wrangled them up.

I dropped Kline from the sky. He multiplied, and beat up the first asshole we saw. And when they were broken and bruised, I carefully stuck twenty of these barbs into its fur and left it with Kline.

I returned twenty minutes later, put a barb into the fur of a small second evolution creature I found, and then smashed it.

Death—instantly.

Suddenly, this intelligent creature understood that if it moved too fast, it would die. And it communicated the tale to the other beasts that joined it.

I became a cowboy and Kline the herding cat. Two days later, I managed to herd five third evolution beasts, all well-fed on soul meat and terrified to move too much because of the barbs in their fur.

Once they had all gathered, we made them move along the Diktyo like prisoners—en route to the Fifth Ring.

The closer we got, the more they slowed down and looked at Kline and the others.

It was clear that they recognized that death was coming, and they wanted to know whether Kline, the poison, or being eaten was the worse death. And when we turned a bend along the river and entered Harrowed Pass, the soul pressure shifted so dramatically that I could barely breathe. The beasts bucked in distress, and I looked around with bated breath.

The area we had been walking through previously was called Typhan's Gorge, which is a narrow passage that comes after you pass the Keliam River (where the crypt was) and continue past the mountain that's right above our area.

It was a gorgeous canyon with lush green plants growing up the towering walls cut between two mountains, but when we reached Harrowed Pass—

It was obvious.

It wasn't just obvious—it was mythical.

You take certain things for granted—like how ravines and gorges and canyons are all creations of water erosion. Some have foliage like ditches; others are curved walls of stone, always moving and twisting and curving slightly like rock does—

But not Harrowed Pass.

Harrowed Pass was a tunnel of obsidian that stretched for twenty miles. It was punched out of a mountain, so you could actually see where the mountain had curved up top before most of it had fallen to the ground due to erosion. Everything else was igneous rock where Yakana's arrow had melted through the mountain, turning everything to white-hot molten stone before cooling into charred rock and obsidian glass.

And it was not welcoming whatsoever.

There was crazed plant life within this monstrosity, and it was surrounded by crushing soul pressure that was utterly unnatural. It was like walking from a dry desert into a sauna and knowing that behind any one of the massive boulders that had fallen from the top of the mountain—now surrounded by strange, evolutionarily warped plant life—there could be beasts the size of houses that could run faster than a bullet train.

This was not what I imagined when I came to do this.

I was expecting mountains and hills and preparations—not half a mile of solid, unperturbed land before the first major rock to act as cover. Once I entered that tunnel—I was fresh meat.

Luckily, I wasn't going into that tunnel—the other creatures were.

"Alright, in you go," I said.

The beasts broke free and decided to rush Kline at the same time with an "I'll take you with me!" approach, but Kline teleported us far away, right before a piercing roar of toroks echoed in the forest behind us and made the beasts fall still.

These were my illusions, standing between the Fourth Ring and the Fifth, preventing my prey from turning and fleeing.

They weren't real, but they certainly sounded real. The sound grew deeper and deeper as the toroks approached, running on hands and legs, towering eighty feet tall with calcified masks. They turned the corner, saw these third evolution beasts—and roared.

These creatures suddenly didn't know that I was there, or Kline was there, or about the beasts in Harrowed Pass—they had been challenged by not one Torok but five.

They turned and ran right into Harrowed Pass as I watched, forming a poisoned hurricane arrow, just in case, flying and flapping in the sky with Kira's wings as I watched the chaos my illusions were creating.

These beasts ran and stumbled, and when one of them turned to fight the torok, I made its body invisible and showed the others the image of the torok ripping it in half and swallowing its blood. Absolutely gruesome work.

Something I had dreamed of and practiced.

These beasts ran faster and faster and faster until a confused fourth evolution creature walked out from behind a large boulder.

It was not as large as a torok.

In fact, it wasn't even half the size of a torok. It was probably twice the size of a rhino with large jaws like an alligator, despite having the general body of a Triceratops. And when it saw the stampeding crowd—it took a piss on my plan.

It didn't eat them. It didn't scratch them. It didn't even get near them. It just opened its mouth, and it released a blast of wind so savage that it ripped all five of the beasts to meat paste as the poison and blood flew right back at me.

"Then don't... whatever. Brindle gave me his memories. Well, up to the end of the war. He found you past The Crown, so I didn't see you."

Kyro's eyes widened to the size of saucers... or dimes or whatever. Tiny little shit.

"You're not joking," he said.

"Nope," I said. "My core is disturbingly malnourished, but after I visit Lake Nyralith and evolve my cores, I should be able to perform soulmancy. Or at least, a portion of it."

"Just like that?" he asked.

"Just like that..." I said. "Guess Brindle and Yakana are all in on me being a guardian. I can even navigate the Bramble."

Kyro gulped.

"Don't worry," I said. "I think something in Brindle's mind also fucked me up a bit. 'Cause I've been gardening the forest a bit and my viewpoints on..." I lifted my bucket and looked at the beast's corpse. "Are a bit heartless. Or just... apathetic? Anyway, the only thing I'm bothered about is losing the soul meat to the poison. It would've been a boon."

Kyro laughed and looked to the sky with watery eyes and said, "Please, for the love of whatever gods you believe in—don't become like Brindle."

I raised an eyebrow. "I thought you loved Brindle?"

"I also love Reta despite her being a heartless bitch who thoroughly traumatized me," Kyro said. He lifted his flask. "Like the drinking problem?"

He took a drink and shivered.

"So that's why you call her a witch..."

"Yeah," Kyro said. "That woman... She's a demon. A born killer. But she's also the main reason we've survived this long. So yeah, when Nythralis sent you a teacher, she sent you the best. A bit hard to work with these days, but the best."

I thought back to her creating the Misty Row with Brindle. "Yeah... she's something."

"Anyway..." He waved his hand back toward my house, and we walked on. Much of it was spent in silence, but he did say, "So how's your village?" and I told him. I asked, "Are you guys gonna visit? They can't talk about you," and he said, "We'll wait a few years."

I nodded. "That's wise."

"But I do want to meet Felio."

My eyes lit up, and then they dimmed, and I said, "No."

He furrowed his brow. "No?"

"Yeah, no. 'Cause once you meet her, you're always going to say, You should be more like Felio, and I'm going to hate my life."

"How strange. If you know I'm going to say that, don't you think that you should probably be more like..."

"Shut up," I said, and we walked on. Stay tuned for updates on My Virtual Library Empire

We were about four miles outside of the village when we finally stopped. I set my gear down, and Kyro asked, "Here?"

I nodded. "Here."

I dug a trench and lined it with Diktyo Water, and used one of Brindle's techniques to prevent the ground from absorbing the water before adding the soul water and binding the soul within the water.

"You really do have his memories..." Kyro said.

I nodded. "I do."

"How long is this going to take?" he asked.

"'Till fall," I said. "Yakana's soul is large yet thin. This soul is not only pure, but it has more aura and cleansed neara than miles of Yakana's soul. It should divert course and strain all of its resources to get here as quickly as possible."

Kyro's lips curved into a strange smile.

"Yeah," I said. "I know. Yakana will live, but that thing'll do substantial damage and potentially block out key communications for centuries."

Kyro's face turned grave.

"Yeah," I said. "This is the right thing to do. So just sit back and watch, and I'll show you something incredible."

Kyro scoffed. "You do get that I'm a soulmancer, right?"

"Well, then you'll watch someone with tens of millennia less experience do shit that you learned over millennia."

He frowned. "You're turning into a total bitch."

I chuckled and grinned and said, "Then you guys shouldn't've spoiled me so much. Memories. Teachers. Soul guardians. Elixirs. Guides. I've been eatin' from a golden spoon. The least I can do is show you that it was worth the investment."

Kyro smiled and lifted his flask. "But you don't have to be a bitch about it."

I laughed and nodded. I liked Kyro. I liked him a lot.

I finished building the soul well and stood and stretched. "Well, you're welcome to dinner whenever. But I gotta go."

"What are you doing now?" he asked.

"I'm going to use that flower we got from the Row," I said. "Elana's sent me god-class ingredients to turn it into an elixir of Immortality..." I paused and looked at him. "Tell Trant. I get you have a no-fly policy right now, but this might be the only chance he gets to see ingredients of the gods."