Ember doesn't stop flying through the air for almost half a minute as the final bursts of the yellow fruit wear off. He powers down his full dragon form and we both float in the open air in our base forms while staring back at the black forest. My body and mind feel many times sharper than they did just minutes ago, before eating this fruit, but at the same time, I feel a massive wave of exhaustion come over me as my body isn't used to exerting that amount of mental and physical force. It feels like the withdrawal symptoms of the red and orange core. All of my raw unfiltered senses scream at me to eat the yellow stone resting in my hand that dropped from the lizards' corpse, but I can tell my mind is playing tricks on me. I grit my teeth and let it fall into my item storage and boost my self-regeneration skill as the feeling of exhaustion and yearning for more yellow energy grows stronger and stronger. A noticeable amount of the perception boost remains in my system even after the majority of the yellow power flows out. I can still sense the weak presence of all of the lizards who try to hide their presence in the trees nearby. I take deep breaths and focus on them lurking in the trees waiting for more orange-cored insects to fly by. Far off in the distance, I hear the rattling of chains and rock breaking and shifting. This confirms he did in fact take the majority of the burden, but a faint memory in the back of my mind of silver and golden sparkling energy helping from the most inner part of his core flashes in my mind for a moment. I get the suspicion that this added to his longer recovery time too. He begins to shift into his full dragon form and eyes the forest, so I don't bother to pry more. We have a more important task at hand right now. I pull my sword from my item box and we enter the forest again in search of another chameleon. Once we find one nearby, guarding its golden fruit, I eat the yellow gem from our last kill and a surge of power that feels almost identical pulses through me. This time, I'm capable of holding even more energy in my body and far less is siphoned out through my feet. This creates an even denser concentration of threads in my greater form, boosting the power in my sword, and heightening my perception even further to reach far out into many more nearby islands. If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. My Soul Energy imbued greater form glows golden and slices through the tough outer scales of the lizard we ambush, leaving a deep wound in its side and tearing off two of its arms. Ember's claws tear through its neck as well, and the creature shrieks and falls from the tree. We swoop back in to finish the job with a single strike of my blade to collect its stone and the golden fruit it was protecting. Once we leave the trees and power down to conserve energy and undergo the healing and withdrawal process again, it only takes me 5 hours to recover this time. To my surprise, even though I'm positive I took on the bulk of the divine energy this time, Ember still takes a few hours longer. Far more tendrils of yellow energy course through both of our bodies now, and his response when he wakes up is an interesting one. "We're ready. Both of us will be enhanced this next run. You eat the fragment, I'll take the fruit. You won't have to make contact with me, we can fight the enemy with a more dynamic approach." I take in a gasp of fresh air and stand to my feet, then look up toward the sky. My gaze spreads out through my new reality, seeing the lizards and the floating islands with much more depth. However, I freeze when I notice what is making the air so dense with excess divine threads, and the environment so hot up here... In the furthest point of my newest enhanced senses, I finally feel where the tops of the obsidian trees end. Above them, a pair of enormous green eyes stare down at me filled with no malice, but pure curiosity.