Only a few feet from the cavern’s ceiling, Elijah circled the tree. The swarm of blood beasts, slithering and squelching disgustingly, surrounded the entire island upon which it stood. Their numbers reached well into the hundreds of thousands, and with every passing moment, more joined via two distinct streams of shelled lamprey-mouthed leeches. As he glided, he considered his options. His first impulse was to simply land among them, then use a combination of Nature’s Claim and the scourgedrake form’s Spreading Blight combined with Ethereal Sepsis to spread mass casualties among them. However, he had seen the way those things moved, and he suspected that if he followed that strategy, he’d end up being overwhelmed. Elijah was immensely powerful, but as he’d recently learned, he was far from invulnerable. Especially against creatures that could sweep across an entire swamp, stripping it of all life along the way. Perhaps he could come out on top in such a conflict, but he didn’t want to chance it unless absolutely necessary. Still, there was some urgency. At present, the spider guardian was shielded by her webs. However, that would not remain the case for much longer. Evidence that some blood beasts had already broken through stood all around her. Piles of their corpses formed an impromptu wall, evidence that she was no easy target. But the blood beasts would keep coming. Follow current novels on 𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹·𝗳𝗶𝗿𝗲·𝗻𝗲𝘁 Their numbers clearly weren’t infinite, but there were so many of them that the swarm might as well have been ceaseless. After a few moments, Elijah decided that a frontal attack was not the right strategy. Rather than simply wading into battle, he needed to use some of the recent lessons he’d learned – specifically in the fight against the war elves. Certainly, that battle had left him close to death, but that was only because Gunnar had chosen that moment to attack. If the sniper hadn’t intervened, Elijah would have finished the entire army off on his own. He was strong. He was versatile. But if he used his brain, he could become unbeatable. To that end, he quickly wheeled around, then flew toward the south. After dipping through one adjacent tunnel, he found his way to the next level up. Ten minutes later, he once again ascended. When he wanted to, he could move incredibly quickly, and he used that ability to cover quite a lot of ground. But he didn’t mean to escape. Instead, he was searching for the end of the blood beasts’ influence. It took quite a while, but eventually, he found just what he was looking for when he passed over a large, shaggy creature that, from its appearance, Elijah marked as a wild troll. It was barely ascended, but it pulsed with so much life that he knew it would be exactly what he needed. He hit it in a dive, knocking it into a nearby tree. The swamp only covered the lower levels, and the current biome looked much like a surface forest. Elijah barely noticed it as he went to work. The troll recovered quickly, leaping to its feat and attempting to bludgeon Elijah to death with its massive arms. It missed badly. Even in his human form, Elijah was more than capable of outpacing the thing. And when he shifted into the Shape of the Master, the troll had no chance of laying a claw on him. He harried it for a few minutes, ensuring that he had its attention, and then took off. The troll followed, lumbering behind him with long, comparatively slow steps. Even as it picked up speed, Elijah saw the wounds he’d inflicted sealing. Even the clumps of shaggy hair that had flown free with each slice of his scythe regrew. In the space of thirty seconds, it was back to perfect health. There was no way its regeneration attribute was high enough to support that kind of healing, so it was obvious that it was the result of some sort of passive trait. Elijah smiled – at least as much as he could in the Shape of the Master, which was the only form in which he could truly emote – as he raced ahead of the wild troll. By the time he reached the first descent, he realized that he had left the creature behind. When he went back, he saw that it had lost his trail and had wandered in the wrong direction. So, it wasn’t very smart, either. Or maybe it just lacked the sensory capabilities of most wild animals. Whatever the case, Elijah regained its attention by slashing through its hamstrings. It flopped to its face, but it recovered enough to let out a cavern-shaking roar and resume its pursuit after only a few moments. From there on out, Elijah led it gradually, periodically circling back to ensure that it continued to follow his trail. His progress wasn’t what he wanted it to be, but it also wasn’t quite as slow as he’d initially feared. One level after another, he retraced his steps until, at last, he reached the swamp. That was when he turned on the troll and reengaged. The creature showed no signs of fatigue, which was impressive considering how far they’d come. That didn’t help it, though. Elijah felt just as fresh as when he’d begun, and he was much, much faster than his foe. Still, hacking the thing’s arms and legs off wasn’t quite as easy as he’d hoped. He managed it well enough, though. Once he did, he retreated, shifted into the Shape of the Sky, then swooped in. He grabbed the limbless troll in his talons, then flew toward the ceiling. Only a few minutes later, he dropped the bait only a mile away from the tree and the spider’s lair. Elijah didn’t wait to see if his plan was effective. Instead, he went back to where he’d dismembered the troll and gathered its severed limbs. Those were deposited next to the main trunk of the creature’s still-living body. This content has been misappropriated from NovelHub; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. It only took a couple of minutes, but in that time, the blood beasts had already taken notice. A stream had already broken off from the main group to descend upon the fallen and defenseless troll. Elijah knew it would take quite a while for them to kill the thing off – if they could even manage it, given the creature’s immense regeneration – but he wasn’t going to stick around to see it. Instead, he headed back to the forest, where he hunted another beast to add to the mix. He didn’t like sacrificing the wildlife, but in the hierarchy of importance, guardians and natural treasures stood far above a simple animal. Maybe that was evidence of his hypocrisy, but Elijah was secure in his approach. The next beast was a feathered, bear-like creature that was much higher-leveled than the troll. It was more intelligent, too, so it took quite a bit longer to lure it back to the swamp. Elijah managed it through a combination of hit-and-run tactics and some herding techniques he’d witnessed back in the steppes around Khotont. It took a little longer to guide it to the swamp, but once it was there, he treated it the same as the troll, dropping it only a few feet away from the surprisingly still-living creature. The mass of blood beasts had grown significantly, and Elijah could only hope that pattern would continue. Over the next few hours, he repeated the process, adding more than a dozen corpses. There were no other trolls about, but he did manage to find some large, often high-level beasts that wouldn’t die quickly. By the time he’d finished, the bulk of the blood beasts had shifted from the spider’s lair to his gory pile of corpses. That would need to be enough. He took three more trips before he was ready. And just like he’d done against the war elves, he started things off with Nature’s Claim, throwing the infected creatures into the writhing mass of blood beasts. Immediately, the fungal infection spread, and after only a couple of seconds, mushrooms exploded from the blood beasts’ backs. Elijah kept it going for a few more minutes, steadily peppering them with the results of his most recent gathering expedition. He hated forcing suffering upon the animals he’d found, but he saw no other way to simultaneously gather and strike the first blow against the swarm of blood beasts. The creatures went into a frenzy, but they had no idea where to find Elijah. It seemed that the copious amounts of blood he’d introduced into the system had served to muddle their senses. Once he’d exhausted his supply of impromptu bioweapons, he approached the mass, remaining as careful as he could along the way. The carnage he’d already wrought was impressive, but in the goriest way possible. Nature’s Claim didn’t kill cleanly, after all. It was like witnessing the aftermath of a scene from a particularly gruesome horror movie, but Elijah forced himself to see it. To sense it. Anything else would hide the very real cost of his tactics. Of his sometimes questionable choices. For the next step, he set himself on a perch only a few feet above the blood beasts. The things could climb, but in their frenzied and panicked state, they had no idea he was even there. Insanely, the troll still lived, though its healing hadn’t had a chance to progress. Perhaps the blood beasts drained ethera as well as blood. Whatever the case, Elijah had no intention of finding out firsthand. Instead, he embraced Eternal Plague, tapping into the reservoir of False Grove to fuel the initial stages. That pool of ethera was exhausted in a matter of seconds, but Elijah knew he needed to stretch his supply of energy as far as it could go. Because despite gathering most of the blood beasts in one place, he had a lot of ground to cover. His spell conjured hundreds of tiny mosquitoes with each passing second, but in doing so, it greedily drank the ethera from False Grove, then his core. Thankfully, his upgraded mind cultivation – and the eighty-one apertures that came with it – mitigated some of that drain. The effect was that he could maintain the spell a lot longer without resorting to Grove Conduit, which let him tap into the dense ethera and vitality of his island. Still, he’d always known that its use was inevitable. He had too many blood beasts to kill. Once, Elijah had conjured a swarm large enough to down a mountain-sized mechanique, but since then, he’d gained more than a few levels. That, combined with his increased cultivation, allowed him to exceed that high water mark. Still, it took hours to reach that point, but he kept going long after. Eventually, the entire chamber was filled with conjured mosquitoes. Each one was capable of delivering multiple afflictions upon his enemies, and at his direction, they did just that. All around him, wave after wave of blood beasts died. Unfortunately, they were almost universally too low of a level to give him any experience. But he wasn’t there for progression. He was there to right a wrong. He was there to save a guardian. And he put every part of him into that endeavor. Elijah knew that from the very beginning. Even if he’d killed hundreds of thousands of the blood beasts, he couldn’t deal with all of them. Not without getting his hands dirty. So, when his store of ethera depleted to dangerous levels, he cut off Eternal Plague. He had enough ethera to fuel a transformation into the Shape of Scourge, so even as he greedily sucked more energy into the eighty-one apertures of his mind, he took on the form of a ten-foot-long dragon-raptor. Then, he descended from his perch. His taloned feet hit with a wet squelch as a carpet of blood beasts burst under foot. There were so many of them that they’d formed an island of shelled flesh around the mangrove tree from which he’d cast his spells. For nearly a hundred yards in every direction, they were all dead. However, beyond that mark, a few had managed to avoid the now-dissipated mosquitoes. Elijah wasted no time before charging them. The first few went down at the end of his talons, but he was soon forced to use every natural weapon at his disposal. His tail lashed out, impaling blood beasts with every strike, and his talons never lost an opportunity to tear one of the disgusting creatures apart. Once enough had gathered together, Elijah used Spreading Blight, which jumped from one beast to another, toppling them like detestable dominoes. But it wasn’t enough. Periodically, the creatures would latch onto his scaley flesh, but they struggled to find purchase. When they did, sinking their fangs into his scales, he realized why they were so dangerous. As he’d suspected, they didn’t just drain blood like a leech, but they also took a trickle of ethera. And if enough of them managed to latch on, that trickle would become a raging river that foretold his death. Thankfully, he had more than enough wherewithal to keep that from happening. But he soon surmised that he couldn’t kill them with his current tactics. No matter how lethal Shape of the Scourge was, there were just too many of the creatures. He’d run dry of stamina before he had a chance to finish the job. But fortunately, his regeneration had never ceased. With every passing second, his apertures, which seemed like miniature whirlpools in his mind, pulled more ethera into his soul. In turn, his soul pushed it into the reservoir that was his core, replenishing the spent energy until, after a few hours, he was topped off. So, he leaped skyward, bounding off of Cloud Step and once again, established himself atop one of the trees. He shifted back to his human form, ripped a stubborn blood beast away from his leg, then embraced Eternal Plague. He didn’t dare re-use Grove Conduit – Nerthus would never forgive him for that – but he didn’t need to. He just needed to kill the blood beasts in stages. Without further delay, he did just that, but given the numbers arrayed against him, he knew he had quite a task before him.