Andalushia Ibadi al-Shiraz enjoyed a peaceful bath in one of the many bath houses of Intak Solfan. Since her youth, she had been ingrained with a culture of bathing, so she loved finding the best baths she could whilst traveling. And a heated pool with beautiful floral tiles and mosaic frescos was certainly up there. The warm water heated her body below her shoulders, whilst the aforementioned tiles cooled down her arms in an exquisite clash.

  “Ah, I lecture Auri a lot on his promiscuity, but I live for these baths too~” She moaned in the truest of pleasures as her legs started floating, no longer bound by any weight or self-control. “He can stay missing for a year more if he pleases.”

  Her travelling companion, Auri, had been missing for a while now whilst they were travelling around Secto. Knowing that death was only an inconvenience to the man, however, she just took his disappearance as a long-overdue vacation. Though her skin would have brought problems with all the racists over at Grwcia, Sanaar, and Crocheta, so she decided to mostly do tourism over here in Intak Solfan.

  Whilst she was completely capable of defending herself against anyone, traveling had taught her that the best way to live was to be wholly unremarkable and cause no issues. She had also fled Secto instead of looking for Auri because it was probably one of the most misogynistic countries she had been in and she definitely didn’t want to travel alone in a place like that, no matter if she could split men in half with a single finger.

  Resorting to that usually soured her mood for the rest of the day at best and the whole journey at worst.

  “How horrible the Existence is for a woman to be forced to travel with a chaperone to just be able to enjoy her travels…” She groaned absentmindedly. “Why cannot the default state be misandry instead of misogyny?”

  “Have you thought of neutrality and the non-discrimination of any gender?” A voice suddenly said and she felt the water of the pool ripple.

  “Excuse me, I rented the whole…” When she opened her eyes, he saw him. A pale skin clearly not Intaksolfani. But what was highlightable about the man – barring his brave nakedness – was his hair. Completely white. That was, unfortunately, a trait Andalushia recognized. “What are you doing here, Nameless?”

  The man looked at her with a smirk but no interest in her body, whether it was because he had modesty or understood the social rules of a bathhouse. Andalushia peered into his eyes, just like hers weren’t quite emerald, his weren’t quite cyan.

  “Can’t a man just travel in peace and try to meet old acquaintances?” He responded softly, his body drifting deeper into the pool. “Damn, these waters are good stuff. Not only thermals, but also really high in the good minerals. Though a bit too much gold in the water for my taste. Not useful for the body.”

  Andalushia did her best to ignore him at first, but she knew he would just keep talking if she did, so she gave up almost instantly, as it was better to enjoy his company.

  “Old acquaintance?” She snorted in derision. “You are not quite old yourself.”

  “I might not be millenary, but I do at least have three digits under my belt,” he raised a brow, his eyes inspecting the mosaics in the walls. For better or worse, the man next to her enjoyed the journey as much as she, though not as much as Auri, as he was here meeting with her instead of getting lost in wanderlust.

  “A petulant child,” Andalushia raised her palm from below the water, her hand becoming a bowl for a few drops of the somewhat white water. It certainly was high in gold, even if it wasn’t visible to the naked eye. “A century is nothing in the grand scheme of things.”

  “It truly is,” the man without a name admitted. “But I’m trying my best here. When one stands on the shoulders of giants, he cannot help but outgrow them.”

  “Is that what you are trying to do here?” The black-skinned woman’s eyes darted through the open pillars of the front of the bath house, allowing her to peer into the heavens and see a circumference shining instead of a circle. “Do you enjoy the rocks?”

  Nameless snickered and raised a palm of his own. Matter suddenly appeared in his hand. Instead of water, there were gemstones. Onyx, carnelian, opal, agate… it seemed like he had everything at his disposal.

  “I cannot deny that the physicalizing of cognitive capacity through silica is amusing, but I cannot say I am here for them.” The rocks started floating around in perfect and synchronous dances, their shapes becoming an infinite repeating and oscillating fractal pattern that collapsed in itself. But most importantly, one of those agates wasn’t like the others. One was glass.

  Perfectly reflecting glass.

  Upon seeing that impossible sight, Andalushia had a statement and a question.

  “You’ve been to Oxalt Dorea,” she recriminated and the fair-skinned man nodded. “But how?”

  “How I’ve been there, or how I have this little friend?” Andalushia frowned at his sarcasm. “Right, right,” he chuckled. “I mean, talking in chemical composition, glass is just silica. Most people here have their minds limited to the concept of ‘agate’, but that’s not the case for me.”

  “But that should only apply to normal glass and not…” She recognized the type of glass the man was manipulating with his mind. And it partially scared her, yet made her angry at the same time. “And not Myriad.”

  “I prefer to call it Oxalt Doya instead of Myriad, and technically speaking, it’s just silica with certain impurities. But considering Agatecraft can also manifest these impurities, I just nudged it ever-so-slightly to give me ones I desired.”

  “You can do that?” The petite woman raised her brows. She couldn’t perform Agatecraft due to her special status, as she was solely limited to Cultivation, but that didn’t apply to the Unaligned man next to her.

  “Sure,” he shrugged. “Some people out there have agates with obsidian crystals in them. Just fragments, but still respectable enough to be a certain percentage of the agate. They just do that subconsciously, of course. While I take a more active role in the own materialization of my cognition.”

  The ashen-haired next to her was one of the worst types of people in Existence: a scholar. A type of person who had to categorize and discover everything, even if they could just enjoy life as it was. But no, they had to dig deeper and deeper, and more often than not, without any regard to anything else but their investigation. But without a shred of doubt, the worst part is that they love abusing an advanced lexicon.

  If age had taught her something, it was that the simpler the words, the better. Whilst she had long passed her phase of ‘mystical old being’, the man without a name was just entering it. Which made it hard not to punch him in the face.

  “So if you haven’t come here to just toy around with glass and stones, why are you here, Nameless?” Andalushia turned to face him. They were both relaxed in the mineral waters, but he looked bigger than before.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t deny that this kind of toying furthers my goal…” As soon as he said that, his Myriad-agate started shining. Not in its typical light-reflecting behavior, but out of self-luminance. The yellow and life-giving glow instantly betrayed the source of Power.

  “Of course, you’ve gotten access to Grace too,” she felt her roots tremble with annoyance. “Couldn’t resist getting inside a woman?”

  “Oh, Andalushia!” Nameless pressed his hand against his chest in mock offense. “I also got inside men.”

  The dark-skinned woman snorted and smiled. “Well, at least you have a redeeming factor.”

  “Like they say, there’s no reason to turn your back on the best of both worlds,” he snickered. “But yes, considering Grace is a neutral-end and acquirable power system, it made no sense not to get it into my clutches.”

  “And other people.”

  “And other people,” he reiterated. “It does bother you, doesn’t it?”

  “There are just some power systems that I don’t feel comfortable with, and Grace is one of them.”

  “Such is Existence.” A tendril of tangible light spiraled around the corpulent man’s arm, wriggling like a tentacle, as if the light itself were alive. “Not all power systems are rainbows and sunshine. But even then, I think Grace has a beauty to it.”

  “A beauty that keeps getting defiled by people,” Andalushia added scornfully, her mood rapidly souring.

  “I cannot deny that,” Nameless sighed. “It’s human nature. Turning one of the most beautiful power systems into one of the most repulsive ones. But at the same time, that’s the beauty of humanity.”

  “Being hideous?” She squinted at him.

  “Being curious to the point of morbidity,” the almost-cyan-eyed mad replied with a smile.

  “I’m not so sure about that,” Andalushia skulked. “More than once, I find myself thinking that maybe Existence would be better without humanity.”

  “Are you no longer thinking of yourself as a human?” Nameless prodded.

  “No. I haven’t for a long time,” she responded sternly, a series of roots pulsed below her skin to prove the point. “And neither should you.”

  “Oh, but I’m fully human,” he extended his arms welcomingly in a display of his corpulent humanity.

  “I highly doubt that.”

  “You’re free to think whatever you want, Nature.”

  Andalushia arched a brow. “Calling names now?”

  “Names? It’s your title,” he chuckled. “Just like I don’t have a name, you have your position, Nature Incarnate.”

  Nature Incarnate, the undiluted concept of nature itself – in its laws of the natural world and more common sense of flora and fauna – bound to a single small woman. If she could even be called herself that when her body was a mixture of incohesive gestalt organisms below a mantle of human semblance. But at the same time, every living being was a gestalt consciousness. They just weren’t aware of it.

  “I don’t like the title; it’s easy for people to mistake me for her.”

  “I mean, it’s true,” he recalled his stones and light. “Nature is a bit close to Mother Nature. But now that we are talking about her, I need your help.”

  “You’ve taken…” Andalushia looked at her wrist, even if there was nothing there, a reflex of routine, “five minutes to get to your point. Is that a new record, Nameless? Normally, you would have asked instantly.”

  “I have learned to give people a bit of company after spending a while in Oxalt Dorea, what can I say?” He smiled with honesty, and that was the problem. The being she was looking at was sincere. But she still knew better than to listen to the Unaligned Wanderer. “I might have discovered a way to separate Cultivation into its fundamental parts.”

  That instantly piqued her interest, contrary to her best interests. “Go on.”

  “Now, Cultivation is a remarkable power system by virtue of being that of Primordial instead of an Aspect, but because that is the case, it remains highly divisible. And the problem with Cultivation is that it is not acquirable – at least not for my body structure – but its components… are replicable.”

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  “Before I agree to anything, answer me this question, Wanderer. And be truthful,” Andalushia’s voice made the full pool tremble. “Which one of the components do you desire?”

  “They are all interesting, and I might try to obtain them all, that I will admit. But my interest is Enlightenment.”

  “Enlightenment? Really?” She couldn’t believe what she had just heard. “That one? It’s the most useless one!”

  “Not quite, it has some interesting synergies with cognitive-related power systems.”

  “Like Agatecraft,” Andalushia whispered in realization.

  “More like it’s sub-system lithorica, but yes,” he nodded.

  “I can understand your interest, but I don’t understand why my help is required. Why can’t you do it yourself?”

  “I… The only way I can perform this schism is by physically being in Khaffat, but Life has erected a barrier around the planet that impedes me from traversing it.”

  “A barrier personally targeting you?” Andalushia crossed her arms and looked at him with suspicion.

  “Anyone related to Information,” he admitted.

  “Mother Nature hates them with all her heart, but that hatred extends to you?”

  “I might not be an Incarnation, but Life seems to think that I’m what you are to her but for Information.”

  “And are you?” She looked over his shoulder, which looked curious when the man was taller than her.

  “That is a question you must answer yourself,” he smiled in satisfaction. That alone tipped the equilibrium of her thoughts. The sheer fact that Information had a confidant of sorts was proof enough.

  “So you need my help to cross the barrier into Khaffat?”

  “For better or worse, you are an extension of Mother Nature, so if I had a token of your person, I could pass through. And with luck, undetected. But I won’t ask that much from you.”

  “You’re at least reasonable, I will give you that.” Andalushia didn’t have the best of relationships with Life Incarnate, and she might go so far as to say she despised her, but she knew better than to antagonize a Primordial.

  She peered again into those eyes. Just like hers were more jade than emerald, his were more turquoise than cyan. They were independent beings only partially bound to the powers above, and perhaps that would need to be enough. Perhaps what she needed was to demonstrate that to the Mother of All Dryads.

  “You have asked for a favor, but you haven’t spoken of recom-“ As soon as she said that, the earth shook.

  Andalushia looked at the man and squinted at him. “Wasn’t me,” he calmly raised his hands, even as the pool shook violently and debris fell inside.

  Nature Incarnate sighed and stood up. The wanderer let his gaze wander upward as she did so, but he failed to comment on anything. At least he reciprocated by also standing up. Now, his body was worth commenting on, but Andalushia knew better than to compliment a man too much on his body.

  Nameless was the first to walk out of the pool, and as soon as he did, he started glowing and, a moment later, clothes materialized on top of him.

  “How did you do that?” Andalushia had seen a lot of stuff in her lifetime, yet spontaneous dressing wasn’t commonly seen. Even common forms of Magic seemed to have problems with that. Thaumaturgy was a complex subject, even if Agatecraft made it seem trivial.

  “I just drew them,” he shrugged.

  “You… drew them,” she pinched her nose and he smiled at her. “I don’t want to know…”

  Before he could say anything else, Andalushia did the rational thing in such a time-sensitive scenario and grew her clothes. Parts of her skin opened, creating small gill-like crevices, which allowed fibrous textiles to flow out. Many plants already had fabric-like leaves, so she just didn’t bother to produce anything herself. But to also put the fauna in her Nature, she produced red silk and wove it in scant heartbeats to give more definition and personality to her impromptu clothing. Creating such great amounts of textiles from nowhere consumed a lot of vitality, but she had unfathomable amounts of that, so she didn’t care.

  “That was pretty disgusting,” he added.

  “You are disgusting for looking at a lady getting changed.”

  “You literally admitted not being human a moment ago… You know what, I don’t know why I even bother. Let’s just investigate what’s going on.” Nameless took a step forward and one of his agates materialized. He stepped on it as it shifted into a platform, which allowed him to fly. It didn’t take the wanderer even a second to zoom out of the bathhouse, almost breaking the sound barrier as he did so.

  As for Andalushia, she couldn’t say she had the means of flight. Though it wasn’t as if she needed it. Energy in the rawest form pumped into her non-existent veins and, with a single step, she found herself outside the bath house, only a ruptured tile remaining of her previous position.

  “Ah,” she mouthed the moment she was outside, many hundreds of meters away from her original position. It was hard to miss what was happening. “Do you have any idea of what was happening?” She asked the ashen man in the skies.

  “I mean, you have been in Tultet far longer than I, but if I’m right, I think those are leviathans.”

  “Leviathans? Those overgrown crabs?” The gestalt woman pointed at the ocean with her head.

  And overgrown they were indeed, for they could only see the top of their shells and eyes, and yet they towered tens of meters in height with just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. Their size matched that of small mountains, yet they moved with a speed that rivaled ants. Not fast, but catastrophic for something mountain-sized.

  “Yeah,” he commented nonchalantly as all the locals ran away for their lives. “Basically, an aquatic version of the behemoths here. And the thing about the ocean is that it allows life to be substantially bigger than that of terrestrial ones.”

  “Are they dangerous?” Andalushia had to admit that she hadn’t paid much attention to the local wildlife. Ironic.

  “As dangerous as moving mountains can be. They won’t get out of the water, but the sheer displacement of volume is enough to cause localized tsunamis.”

  “Surges,” the woman of the leaf and silken clothes corrected.

  “What?” Nameless turned to face her in confusion.

  “Surges,” Nature reiterated. “Tsunamis are the consequence of seaquakes. These are just the displacement of water in large volumes, so they are surges.”

  “How can you mansplain something as a woman?”

  “I am Nature itself, what can I say?” She shrugged.

  Nameless kept himself to the skies, but Andalushia had to rush to the scene. Now, she could perform pseudo-flight, but it would be too bothersome. So she reached the beach with a jump. She unnaturally paused her momentum before she reached the sand with a burst of vitality. Her body hated the kickback, but the rushing civilians would surely appreciate not being covered in detritus. Because if she moved at full speed without using vitality, they wouldn’t have to worry about surges but actual tsunamis.

  And talking about civilians…

  “Here,” Andalushia picked up a cart that had tumbled down from one of the many crab-born floods and trapped a boy underneath.

  Both the boy and mother looked at her in disbelief as they saw a woman the size of the boy pick up the whole cart with a single hand and hold it in the air, but a screech from the leviathan was enough to make them snap out of their confusion. The petite woman placed down the cart, as unlike other modes of transportation, carts tended to creak and fall apart when grabbed from a single point.

  “Thank you so much!” The matronly merchant – her skin tone and that of the child betraying that they weren’t local – bowed profusely before grabbing the child in her arms and sprinting away, completely forgetting about the cart.

  “Well, I guess she had no way of taking it with her…” Andalushia sighed after she realized that small fact.

  The beast supposed to carry that cart was a colossal and lithic turtle that had hid inside her shell. Even if the monster was capable of moving – which she wasn’t due to being toppled and upside down – she would still be too slow to flee in time, so that’s why she decided to keep herself to her shell as she wouldn’t be drowned or hurt by the surges. Andalushia still didn’t like to see such a majestic beast suffer needlessly, however.

  With a flick of her fingers, Nature flipped the stoneshell back upright. She knew how to perfectly control her strength and instinctively knew that the creature was sturdy enough to not suffer any damage whatsoever from the treatment, but she couldn’t do anything about the stoneshell’s nausea, which afflicted her a bit, especially as the poor beast kept herself to her shell.

  Unfortunately, she wasn’t given time to sulk as Nameless descended from the skies and landed next to her. His white tunic flapped in the wind, and only now did she notice the ellari aesthetic of the fabric, though with some personal touches of the man himself. Seeing the tunic made her think of young Elisandre for a moment, but she quickly discarded the thought of the colorful elf as they had more pressing matters at hand.

  “So, what do we do?” He said, whilst still floating a bit above the ground, as there was a lot of water from the surges. Both the cart, the mount, and the owners had been drenched too, but as Andalushia looked around, there didn’t seem to be any casualties. The leviathans hadn’t had the chance to displace enough water to cause any accidents so far. Just toppled carts and stalls on the coast.

  “I’m normally inclined to neutrality and let nature run its course,” Nameless chuckled at her choice of words, “but I’m led to believe that the people here couldn’t handle these magnificent giants.”

  “Oh, they could, but soldiers and sailors will take a bit to come in big enough numbers to put them down. More than enough time to change zero casualties into tens or hundreds.”

  “I know what you are doing,” Andalushia frowned.

  “And what am I doing?”

  “You’re trying to manipulate me into killing these two,” she said, looking at the majestic crabs looming on the horizon.

  “Oh, I’m not doing that. I know that you are against killing and especially in favor of protecting the ecosystem. I just want to see what you’re capable of. No need for bloodshed, only violence.”

  The cultivator sighed. “I’ll scare them, just keep watch.”

  “Can I join?” The wanderer inspected the situation with scholarly interest instead of a battle-thirsty one. He was closer to a mage than a cultivator, after all.

  “Only if my trick doesn’t work.”

  Andalushia walked forward, her feet failing to get wet by the water as she walked on it. It was especially hard as it was already receding from the waves and gravity, but still trivial.

  “I can see you are a boy and a girl,” Nature projected her voice potently, but not quite shouting, as she talked to the leviathans. Even though she only looked like one small human to them, they still looked at her with interest. “I will guess that you are doing this as a mating ritual, getting out of the water and having some fun before retreating back, but from the thousands of uninhabited islands, you picked a very inhabited island to do so. To this I ask you both, can you take your mating elsewhere?”

  Their only answer was a shared screech.

  “I thought as much,” the jade-eyed beauty sighed. “Well, don’t say I haven’t warned you!”

  The air, the water, the ground… all suddenly became colder. The clouds in the sky suddenly became darker and more numerous. As for Andalushia, she simply raised her bare foot past her head, putting her leg completely parallel to her torso and then brought it down with a thundering swing.

  “Sky-blessed Shattering: Thunderous Strike!” The instant her foot touched the water, the air exploded and was flooded with light as a potent lightning bolt descended from the heavens and struck between the two leviathans.

  The deep-sea creatures, unused to the surface, got scared from the airborne electric discharge, but they still held their ground. As terrified as the leviathans might be, they were obtuse and thick-skulled beings – ignoring their lack of cranium do to their cancrine origins – that would prefer to get on with their coitus even if that meant facing the wrath of nature.

  “Huh,” Andalushia grunted in surprise. “I really thought that would do the trick. Okay, Nameless, you’re up. I don’t want to be the one hurting these younglings.”

  “A pleasure,” the turquoise-eyed man appeared from nowhere and summoned his agates. “Though I wonder how you will justify this. You follow his steps on neutrality and non-interference, but that lightning didn’t look from this world.”

  “I believe there’s a command called Shock out there. They will think I’m just a powerful lithorist expert in that command,” she answered plainly and limited herself to watching the man work.

  Even though the man couldn’t have had these agates for more than a handful of years, he commanded them with far more dexterity and mindfulness than any other local individual Andalushia had seen before. It also didn’t help that one of those ‘agates’ shone like the sun. Instead of shooting them directly at the leviathans like most people would have done, he aimed for the water. She had no idea why he had done so, but she got her answers soon enough.

  “Three, two, one…” He counted down with glee. “And, boom.” The wanderer said softly, a whisper that clashed potently against the event that it anticipated.

  Not even a second later, powerful and high pillars of water erupted, far bigger than the exposed parts of the leviathans themselves, easily reaching tens of meters high, if not hundreds. The shockwave from the explosions were powerful enough to throw to the ground some of the people who were running away, hundreds of meters away. Fortunately, no one seemed to have had their eardrums ruptured because of it.

  The pillars of water threw more water on the coast than any of the leviathans had done, but most of it had been vaporized by the explosions, turning the potential cataclysm into just a thick and very humid fog.

  “What was that?” She asked calmly as the leviathans started scuttling back into the ocean out of distress rather than fear or wounds. Shockwaves were especially vulnerable to this type of chitinous and armored critters. So perhaps they hadn’t been hurt – badly at least – but they certainly were no longer in the mood to procreate.

  “Cavitation bubbles,” he answered in satisfaction as he took a deep breath to inhale the mist.

  “What?”

  “You know, cavitation bubbles, when you make a void in…”

  “I know what cavitation bubbles are,” Andalushia interjected. “And I also know for a fact that they cannot get big and powerful enough to cause this much…”

  A piece of detritus fell next to them as she spoke, a chunk of a leviathan’s lithic carapace. Only a nail for the colossal monster, yet a boulder the size of an elephant for everybody else. Nature didn’t bother to dodge because her keen senses told her that it wouldn’t hit her, but the same didn’t apply to her conversation partner. The rocky projectile hit him dead on.

  “…destruction.” The dark-skinned woman turned her head to look at the ashen-haired man, the left side of his body gone, even if he had managed to maintain himself upright. “Are you okay?”

  “Perfectly,” Nameless replied, even if he was lacking an arm, and she could peer into the insides of one of his lungs and his brain.

  “Right…” She mindlessly added, a cold shiver spreading throughout her body at the sight.

  “Do I have your favor after having peacefully repelled the leviathans?” His lung jerked as he spoke, but he didn’t seem to care. It was a completely unnatural sight as blood didn’t flood the lung and instead kept flowing normally, even if there were several ruptured blood vessels and there were no walls containing the blood inside. His flesh palpitated and started growing. Regenerating.

  “Y-yes.” Andalushia had seen many things in her long life, and she wasn’t a stranger to gruesome acts of regeneration, but this one was far more brutal than any other she had seen before in her life. For there wasn’t any Power in that regeneration, not vitality, not mana, not Grace. Just pure… and natural life.

  Nature’s mind was a strong barrier powered by the infinite essence of flora and fauna, yet her thought echoed so strongly that even Nameless could hear it ripple in the cognitive plane.

  The worst thing humanity did was understand the horrors beyond their comprehension, for that only motivated them to make greater horrors.

  What she was looking at, after all, was nothing more than a human. A true, unmoored, and terrifying human.

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