Elder Cultivator

Despite how he appeared on the surface, Tauno’s style wasn’t one of brute force. Or not solely brute force. He liked to use his power where it was applicable, taking advantage of weaponry and the force multipliers they provided while aiming for weak points on his targets. Everyone tried to do that to some extent, but Tauno took the best parts of his foes for future use.

With his spine spear gone, clearly it was time to upgrade his weaponry. He needed something with high offensive power and durability. From what he could see, about half of this beetle probably counted. Part of the problem was the scale it was acting at, and how hard it made it for it to assault him.

The mountain sized beetle wasn’t helpless, though. It had heaps of energy to batter him with, and the flexibility of its limbs was something that honestly didn’t even make much sense. The segments of its legs could bend around in such a way that it was able to attack him with some of its rear legs when he was on the front, and with its front legs when he was at its back. In the middle, he was subject to attack from both sides.

Tauno’s current efforts were all based around trying to get the creature tangled up in itself, which might require some physical repositioning on his part. Getting a grip on a giant leg was a bit difficult, however. The smooth surface of the beetle’s chitin didn’t provide much grip, and unsurprisingly his fingers weren’t long enough to fit around a tower sized appendage.

If he gathered his energy he could extend his grip, but the beetle very quickly shrugged off any hold he had on it. Thus, he had to get the timing just right before it beat him to a pulp. All of that was part of his training to reach Domination… but Tauno knew even if he defeated this creature it wouldn’t be enough. Still, it would bring him one step closer.

The middle was the most dangerous place, but also optimal for his plans. Tauno danced around crashing limbs, making his way to the center around the shockwaves and tornado force winds they generated. Once he was precisely between the middle pair of legs, Tauno prepared himself. The massive beetle could support itself on just two legs, attacking with its front and rear pairs, and it did so, blades angling in on Tauno.

His hands flicked out to the side, his energy grabbing the middle legs and twisting. He didn’t try to pull them into an impossible alignment. Snapping them off directly would have taken more force than he could reasonably generate with his power in Augmentation. But twisting them? The beetle was surprisingly flexible, which was an advantage for trying to deal with smaller foes on its back- for example- but a disadvantage in that it was easier to manipulate them. One twisted back and one forward. As the massive body dropped, the front and rear legs clashed with the middle pair, using the force of the creature against itself.

Massive chitin cracked, shattering the middle legs. Before the massive bulk of the beetle could impact the ground, pulled ponderously down by gravity, the other legs flickered back to their holding positions- but that too was part of Tauno’s strategy. During the moments it was catching its weight, Tauno rushed forward towards the base of its horn, twisting around them to go for the eyes.

Rather than attacking one of the most vulnerable parts of a creature, Taunto felt like he was trying to batter down the fortified walls of a keep, or he supposed that these days it would likely be akin to tearing an orbital platform in half. Or a number of smaller ones, perhaps, as the beetle’s compound eyes had their own weaknesses.

Tauno placed himself in a small ‘valley’ within one of the eyes, and by the time the beetle had stabilized its front legs it simply didn’t have the manual dexterity to pick him out- though it was actually much closer than might have been imagined. The sturdy hairs along one of the front legs threatened to sweep him away many times, but with only one leg involved he could pick out a path for his movement.

The beetle couldn’t move as quickly as it would have otherwise, as it didn’t want to harm its own eye, but Tauno had no compunctions about causing collateral damage with his own movements. Pushing off of the various parts, he picked up speed as he dodged past a sharpened part of the forelimb, snapping off a relatively sharp bit. He began to drag it along behind him, slowly carving apart the beetle’s eye.

At some point it gave up on trying to preserve itself, but by that point its attacks became too reckless, and he still expertly avoided them. All except for one stab that pushed him through the eye and to the back. His body was bruised and broken, but he had an excellent path to what it might call a brain, and its own body now completely protected him. At that point, the battle was already over.

Tauno wanted the creature’s horn… but figuring out how to wield such a thing was a puzzle that might take some time. It was probably as big as a city, so even if he could lift it swinging it would be a bit problematic. But he was going to figure it out, or something else of similar value.

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Before anyone could arrive in Klar to help with interpretation efforts, Anton continued his wandering path. He went wherever his thoughts led him, with no concern whether it was efficient.

Eventually, he ended up in a desert- but just like Xicil, the lack of water did not mean it was without life. There were numerous cacti and other succulents, but also other drought resistant plants. Anton had the feeling that any number of such things could be cultivators, though once again they would have a different style that took particular effort to make out.

At a base, he could only tell that all of the plantlike denizens were greedily soaking up the sunlight from the local blue star, just like everything else. Whether anything was able to think at a higher level or not, that would be the basis for all their power.

There was something else that Anton noticed, however. Fungus living in the dirt was kicked up just by him moving around. Having already dealt with spacefaring bacteria, however, Anton was well prepared to handle small particulates. He didn’t particularly want to breathe in actual dust, either, so he was already prepared to filter everything coming into him.

Though Anton could tell the bacteria would certainly be harmful, without further study it was difficult to tell if any of that would be intentional- if anything of that size could even have ‘intention’. But the point was that it might not necessarily prefer living hosts, though Anton could observe some of the local wildlife to learn about that.

The desert was not entirely without water, it was simply that everything had to use it efficiently. If Anton was to find anything along the lines of cultivation, he could bet that it would involve water manipulation, though heat manipulation was also a possibility.

Anton kept his senses relatively close to him, except for the few targets he was still watching from afar. He found too much was lost when dealing with unfamiliar flows of energy when he focused on the world as a whole. Instead, he limited himself to a number of kilometers, ranging a bit further if he sensed a particularly large source of energy.

With his senses limited in that way, he was quite surprised to stumble upon something he saw before his senses picked it up- aside from a few birds. The particular thing in question was a tree… and not a thin trunked desert sort, weak and scraggly. Instead, it stood proud and tall. No single portion of it was filled with such potent natural energy that it stood out, but taken as a whole it was a very significant find.

The closer Anton got, the more questions he had. The area around the tree was certainly still desert, though the varieties of life around the tree were different than in the rest of the desert. That was because the tree itself provided some measure of shade, which would be detrimental to some life and beneficial to others.

The shade came from the tree’s wide leaves, which were quite antithetical to the desert as they would be prone to evaporation. Absorbing more power from the sun might be beneficial, but unless the tree didn’t use water at all Anton wondered how it functioned.

However, as he got closer his senses picked up actual signs of evaporation, so it clearly had water within it. The question was just where it came from. Was there a special phenomenon where rain fell only in this particular patch of desert? The tree might actually be tall enough to affect clouds- though it was still far shorter than Grandfather Willow- but that wouldn’t explain how it grew to that height to begin with.

As was often the case, the solution was actually far more simple than many of the scenarios he had come up with. Anton’s senses followed the tree’s roots down… and down… and down. There, they spread out as they hit the water table deep underground.

It wasn’t exactly a sustainable situation if there were more similar trees, but with just one slurping up deep water from many kilometers around it Anton supposed it was at least stable. Nor could he judge a plant for just trying to survive and thrive.

The tree did not react in any way as he approached. Anton carefully observed the various things living around it. He had expected something to try to parasite its source of water, but there didn’t seem to be anything.

When he pushed his senses into the body of the tree itself, he picked out at least one possible reason. The water within the higher roots and the trunk was highly alkaline, which meant it would have quite similar properties to acid, though from the opposite chemical direction.

Clearly the tree itself was adapted to live with the change, and Anton even guess it might be on purpose- but determining sapience in the tree was a fruitless endeavor. It was just a tree, and Anton felt no active response to anything he was willing to do. No doubt he could launch an attack and see if it defended itself, but going around damaging things out of curiosity wasn’t particularly nice.

Anton leaned against the trunk, appreciating the shade. Just because he could survive the most extreme environment didn’t mean he actually found them comfortable. Even a small effort of natural energy to regulate himself was a mental drain he would rather be without.

“Let me know if you can tall,” Anton said, rapping on the trunk. He waited a few minutes, just in case it was a slow speaker. “Well, I didn’t think so.”

He would be moving on. He’d sensed a large lizard up ahead. The middle of the day was actually the best time to approach, as it would likely be more relaxed. Many other desert creatures would minimize their activities in the middle of the day, so a lizard could generally relax while sunning itself.

Ectothermic creatures might be just as solar powered as plants. Well, not truly- they would still have to eat, which plants didn’t really do unless you counted free carbon or other gasses. Even so, it made Anton feel a sense of affinity for the creature. If he had a bond with the local star, he would be tempted to provide it a little bit of a boost.

Then again, too much of a good thing wasn’t always good. There was a delicate balance with natural energy. There was a reason people couldn’t just throw a bunch of energy in a new cultivator and expected them to reach Life Transformation. They simply weren’t ready to handle it.

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