9 - Essence

[Newcomer Questline Rewards: One Essence of user’s choice:

* Metal

* Healing

* Spirit

* Mercury

* Blood

* Fire

* Strength

* Decay]

I mentally swiped the notification away. I was a little busy right now, and we needed to move these monster bodies if we were going to bring in families and other innocent people. I shuffled over toward Ashley and she silently pulled out the same knife from before and handed it to me. She pulled another one out and turned to the nearest corpse.

Oliver jogged over before I could take another step. He rested his hand on my shoulder for a second. His hand glowed brightly for a moment and then the ringing, buzzing noise in my ears that I hadn’t even noticed just stopped. He nodded at me with a smile and then stepped over to repeat the process with Ashley before I could thank him.

I kneeled down next to the nearest wolf body and rolled it over onto its back. Or, I tried to. The thing weighed more than I did. Thankfully I had some experience needing to maneuver dead weight. With a little finagling and a lot of wiggling, I go the body turned over. I panted a little from the effort. This was going to be a long process.

I carefully slit through the skin and then the muscle layer of the abdomen. Definitely didn’t want to cut too deep and deal with leaking intestines or something else. I made the cut large enough to fit my arm and then slid it in and dug around the chest cavity until I found a familiar hard, oddly geometric shape nestled near the heart.

With a hard twist and a firm yank it came free and I pulled my arm out. Laying in my palm was a much smaller crystalline object. Very different from the essence I’d found inside the minotaur.

[Monster cores are commonly used to empower enchantments, alchemy, and some rituals. Some realms use monster cores as a kind of currency, giving grades to monster cores based on size, mana density, and any essence present. This is a level one monster core.]

Well, that answered that question apparently. This was definitely a monster core. I didn’t know anyone that could use them now, but eventually they might actually come in handy. I’d have to let Mara know that her intuition was right. Yay…

I set the core off to the side and moved on to the next wolf. There were thirteen cores we needed to collect before we started to worry about moving the bodies.

It was quick work for the most part. Make a couple incisions, grope around inside a body until I found the core and then yank it out. With both me and Ashley working on it we were finished by the time the boys returned from the front of the property.

Ashley managed to find another essence from what we suspected was the alpha dire wolf just based on her size. It was a pack essence. I wondered what that would even pair up with, and what kind of person would want it. But I had a hunch the type of dude-bro it would appeal to.

When John came back he started dragging the wolves off behind the house. He could just grab a leg and pull the whole body behind him like it was a slightly heavy sled or something. That strength essence really was no joke. I wondered if there was a way to make it even stronger. Could we enhance our skills? Something to dig into when we had more than a few minutes.

The house was unlocked so Ashley and I went inside to wash ourselves after we were done. It was surreal. Inside was just an ordinary home. It could have been from any family, from practically anywhere. After the life and death struggles, I almost half expected everything around me to be different too. But there was still so much normal amongst all the crazy.

“Great job out there,” Ashley told me while we washed up in the kitchen.

“Pfft. You were the one doing all the work. You killed most of the wolves out there. I barely did anything,” I tried to pass off the praise.

“No,” she laid a hand on my arm. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that if you hadn’t directly engaged them like that. It was very brave.”

“Oh…ummm…thank you,” I mumbled. We went back to scrubbing ourselves, but I could feel the blush on my cheeks until we separated.

After leaving the house, I decided that I might as well try and figure out what essence I wanted to use my reward for. I pulled the notification back up and scrolled through the options. Some of them I could cross off without much thought.

Metal, strength, healing, and fire were already covered by someone in the party. And they really didn’t mesh with what I was aiming for. I was already more of a frontliner than I really wanted to be.

Mercury I wasn’t sure about. It could be like the element, or it could be like mercurial. I could see a mercurial aspect working for me if it gave me more versatility with my skills or something. Maybe the ability to summon other kinds of bone weapons. I wasn’t really sure how the essences interacted still. It hadn’t been covered in my intro book.

Blood was probably off the table. If I remembered my initial message when absorbing my bone essence, that could lead to some healing or body modification type skills. We already had a capable healer, and the idea of changing mine or someone else’s body gave me a bit of an ick. I could end up truly monstrous.

Decay and spirit both had been indicated to lead toward a necromantic skillset, which if I was honest really appealed to me. Undead minions to fight for me. To protect my friends. That had much more appeal than getting better as a fighter myself.

Decay felt like it had certain connotations though that I wasn’t sure about embracing. Undead were cool and all, but like the kind that actually decayed and stank would not be appreciated by me or anyone in the party. With good reason. It was going to be iffy enough just going down a necromancer path as it was if I was honest.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

After a few more minutes to sit with my decision it was time to commit to it. I summoned up the message from the system and selected spirit. A second later a surprisingly light cube landed in my lap. It was much lighter than my bone essence had been. It was a kind of swirling grey color. Staring at it, I couldn’t detect any movement. Looking at it out of the corner of my eye though had me swearing that there were roiling clouds moving within the depths of the cube.

I hadn’t realized, but the system given essences were all cubes, whereas the ones from monsters were more akin to a twenty-sided die. Rounded, but with corners and flat faces to them.

I concentrated on the essence, like I had the bone essence before. A new message popped up in front of my eyes.

[Newcomer, this is a cube of [Spirit] essence. Spirit essence represents the soul and the divine in many cultures.]

I concentrated on the spirit essence, urging the system to give me more information. I already knew I would be absorbing it, but it’d be nice if I could get a little more guidance on what to expect from it.

[This would be your [second] essence you’ve bound. With the [Bone] essence this would lead you down a path of confluences like [Death] or [Hades]. Many cultures find these paths to be unnatural and have banned their use.]

[Would you like to absorb this [Spirit] essence? Warning, you may only absorb up to three essences. Once chosen, an essence cannot be replaced.]

I took a deep breath and mentally selected yes. I was committed to this path now. For better or for worse. I sighed as the essence dissolved in my hand and I felt a click in the back of my mind at the same time an excruciating pain flashed across it.

New concepts about spirit, the soul, and aspects of the divine flooded my mind. For a brief moment I had prefect knowledge of which entities in Earth’s history were truly divine and which were made up or something else altogether. Then I could feel one of those divinities reach out and wipe that knowledge from my mind.

I felt a cold sweat break out across my skin about how close I came to having my entire mind scrambled. It wasn’t hard to imagine a divinity that could steal memories from me being able to scramble my brains like eggs. Even if it hadn’t been my intent to seek that knowledge, I felt like it’d be smart to be more careful about the essences that I absorbed.

[Congratulations user. You have taken another step on the path to power and becoming an essence user. [Spirit] essence has unlocked the ability [spirit condensing].]

[Spirit condensing binds your soul closer to your physical body and compresses it in preparation for advancing to the next tier. As you progress, your spirit will become more compressed which will make the transition to Rank Two much easier.]

I didn’t feel any new knowledge leech into my brain like with my last skill. This felt like a more passive skill anyway. I was still a little disappointed. It had been kind of cool just instantly learning something. Something much more concrete than understanding the concept of my essences.

I was curious what the others had managed to get. From talking to Mara last night I knew that everyone seemed to get a unique list of essences offered to them.

Mara was off to the side, looking down the drive. I stood up and walked over to her. “Hey, so what did you get for your second essence?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s a great idea! We should totally update each other on what we picked and the skills we have.” She raised her voice, “Hey guys! Come on over for a minute.”

Ashley headed over immediately. Oliver perked up and ambled over as well after shouting at John to hurry up. John came trotting out from behind the house. There were still a few wolf bodies left to drag away, but Mara apparently felt like this was more important.

“Grace had a great idea, we should all share what essence we picked up and any skills we earned,” Mara started as soon as John made it into their huddle. “I’ll go first. I got the mana essence.” She beamed at us.

“Congrats, Mara,” I told her.

“Right, so that gave me a mana manipulation skill. Basically all magic uses mana and I can direct its flow into different glyphs in order to cast spells, even ones that don’t align with my fire essence.” Her voice was getting faster and higher pitched with her excitement. “Guys, I’m going to be a real mage! I just need to get like a book on glyphs and runes or whatever.” By the end she was practically bouncing on her toes.

“Oh, sweetie, that’s amazing. Good for you,” Oliver cooed at Mara. “I got a water essence, which gives me the ability to manipulate and summon water the way Mara does with fire. The really cool thing though is that it’s supposed to eventually mesh with my healing essence to create like healing waters and stuff.” He grinned at everyone.

John reached over and pulled him into a hug, “That’s so great, babe!”

“I’ll go next,” I said after a quiet moment. “I picked up the spirit essence. My skill is basically passive. It compresses my spirit or something. It’s important for the next major step in our growth. I’m not sure, I only got a vague sense of it.”

“Oh, that’s…cool, I guess.” Mara obviously didn’t see the benefits of something like that. She’d always been the kind of person that in games would pick spells and skills that were offensive in nature over defensive or buffing. She was definitely of the school of a good defense is a good offense.

Ashley gave me a much warmer smile. “Maybe we can find something about it and give all of us an idea of what’s coming next.”

I smiled back at her. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. I wonder how we can get more system books and stuff.”

“I guess I can go next,” Ashley said a moment later. “I got the precision essence. It gave me a skill that basically actively tracks where my guns are pointed. So, like a crosshair that moves with my gun so I don’t have to aim down the sights.”

“Oh, cool,” Mara said. She was once again, unimpressed. Though she seemed to approve of that skill more than mine.

“I’m sure it will prove really useful,” I told Ashley. She smiled shyly back at me.

By now, John was practically vibrating out of his shoes. “Finally, the best for last.” He smirked around the circle at everyone. “I picked up the sharp essence, which gave me three essences. That gave me the confluence essence of mithril!” He jumped into Oliver’s arms, nearly bowling him over.

Everyone made excited noises that he immediately shushed. “I can now do so much more than just cover myself in living metal. Check this out,” he said while raising his arm. Metal coated his arm for a moment before it shifted and morphed into a new shape. Where his hand used to be was now a sharpened blade that he whipped through the air. A moment later it morphed again into a spiked mace.

“Oh, that is so fucking cool,” Mara exclaimed. She was bouncing up and down now too.

“I can make all of my metal sharper than a razor. I can shift my body into different simple tools. And I am ten times harder than before, and twice as strong!

“Oh, and get this. There are levels of this shit. When I got my confluence the system said I was now a bronze tier, level one practitioner. There are apparently three tiers we grow through before breaking into rank two, just like Grace was saying. Isn’t that cool,” John said excitedly. He was evidently the same level of nerd as the rest of us, because everyone did look at least a little excited about the information.

Mara jumped a little. She looked down at her phone and then did a fist pump. “Just got a DM, the National Guard guys are sending some people over to help secure the area for the civvies.” She flashed her phone at us, but not long enough for anyone to read anything.

“Ok. John, get back to moving the wolf bodies. We are going to be getting people in the next ten or fifteen minutes,” Mara ordered.

John gave a goofy salute and bounced away, still excitedly talking Oliver’s ear off as his husband followed behind him. I walked over to my bag and pulled out a snack cake and a can of diet coke. I might as well eat now before a bunch of people showed up.

I was two bites into my delicious snack when I heard the crunching of gravel coming down the drive. Well, so much for that idea. I hurriedly stuffed the rest of my food in my mouth and hurried over to where Ashley and Mara were standing by the portal.