The moment he fell asleep he had a dream about the playback that the system had shown him where he had runes over his head. This dream felt like he was watching himself watching the playback, like an out of body experience or something. He felt like this dream had a purpose, like maybe he had missed something that his subconscious is trying to draw his attention to. After it stopped, it started again, Eli looked closely, trying to find what he missed, going over every detail of what was shown to him. He saw the runes appearing over his head, committing their shape to memory, then he focused on how he was still and how the glow around him seemed fascinated, or maybe just very interested. The playback came around again and he just couldn't place what he was supposed to be seeing, what did my mind notice in this that i missed, he thought.
Eli woke up and it all felt fuzzy, he remembered the dream but the details from the playback were a blur. He could feel that it wasn't a normal dream and that it was important, but also that he just really wasn't ready to learn what it was. The short term goals to gain power were important and he needed to focus on that as much as he could, answers will come, or they won't.
He took a couple of deep breaths to get his head right and started to climb down the tree, then stopped when he heard something down below on the ground. He was still pretty high up and with all the branches he couldn't see much but there was something down there moving around the tree he was in. Eli sat on a branch and didn't move, waiting to see what the thing down there was doing, he heard it scratch the tree a few times then keep wandering around. After 5 minutes of waiting it just kept doing the same thing so he waited until it scratched and he would move down a branch. Another scratch, another branch lower, this continued for a while until he was more than half-way down the tree and he got a better look at what he was facing. It looked like an oversized wolf with tree bark plates for skin and its legs and neck were made of twisted and braided vines. The magic he could feel from it practically shouted vitality and life, like the monster had enough to grow a clone of itself from what it held. He finally looked at it long enough for the system to provide some information.
"Jungle Guardian level 10"
"The magic of many jungle plants combined into a guardian"
Setting aside the 'guardian' that he hadn't seen before, this seemed like it would be a tough fight, probably one of those monsters that quickly regenerates and can attack from a distance. It might be best to avoid this one for now, it didn't seem like he would have a good shot at taking it down, he couldn't put his finger on it but it felt strong. The magic he could sense from it felt a bit more dense than his magic or other monster's magic that he had sensed. Maybe if he could open his fire node to fight its plant magic or if he was level 10 he could try and fight for real but he wasn't confident right now. His next thought was to jump from tree to tree and hopefully it wouldn't follow him or be able to track him, the thick jungle canopy stretched for miles so he could probably create a large distance before having to go to the ground again. He steadied himself and jumped to an adjacent tree's branches doing his best to not make a sound but apparently it didn't matter cause the monster followed him anyways and began pacing at the base of his new tree behaving pretty much the same way.
Eli climbed a bit higher and tried again but it didn't help at all and he was still being followed. One thing that struck him as odd was that the bark and vine monster did not seem aggressive at all. It was simply going to the base of whichever tree he was currently in and pacing around occasionally scratching the tree and looking around. Since it did not seem like he could run from it and it wasn't attacking he climbed a bit higher and decided to figure out his best way forward. He worked the thoughts in his head into possible solutions.
Nothing was stopping him from opening a node to help him combat this thing since he could hide and he had over 24 hours to go and the dungeon was 11.8 miles away. Maybe the node opening was the correct way to go at this point, but he also had the option to try and fight it and just hid up in the trees again if it turned out to be too strong. This was much riskier since he could get injured and not be able to jump or the monster could have some way to trap him down below. He could also try and range it by just continuing to jump from tree to tree. He didn't like this option because it would not make him stronger and it would eat up time and he might have to enter the dungeon at his current level of 8. So he would rather work on a node or fight, and without a rock to flip he wanted to get a feel for how long opening a node would take so he got to the highest tree he could and found a branch that would support him while meditating and working with his internal magic.
He closed his eyes and pulled the focus of his magic sense inward and just felt his internal magic moving around inside himself. Its chaotic movements and splashes of power as dense areas within the magic collided. Eli focused on the places where the nodes existed in his body to see if any felt more like they would open then any others. The subtle influence of his light node was not making the shadow node happy but the order and earth nodes seemed to like it somewhat. He could also feel how the light magic was stronger than his unflavored internal magic despite taking up the same amount of space. Next he noticed that his earth node, while having a skill attached, was not anymore open than the others. While he thought that opening earth was a good choice since it would instantly make his smash skill stronger, he wanted to kind of magically poke each one to see how they responded.
He poked all ten of his nodes by using his mental hands to collect some of the power where the denser parts of his magic were colliding and tried to force them inside the node. This had mixed results with the shadow and chaos nodes causing nothing and his life and earth nodes retaining the magic for a bit but then releasing slightly flavored magic. The rest of his nodes somewhere in between releasing varying amounts, while the life and earth nodes would be useful he wanted to try one of the nodes that gave a weaker response first.
Eli collected and pushed and collected and pushed for a few minutes on his air node and he could feel it resisting him but with his will and focus it was holding quite a bit of power. But it wasn't ready to open, this would take much longer and he wasn't sure how long he could focus like this, so he stopped and opened his eyes and rested. After looking around for berries or fruit and finding nothing he sat back down and got back to it, he would open his earth node and just hope he had the mental stamina to get it done.
Again, he closed his eyes and brought his focus to his internal magic, just observing at first to see if anything he had done had changed anything. It hadn't. He grabbed and he pushed and he held the magic in the node while grabbing more and more, only pushing in the power from the dense magic collisions since it felt the strongest part of the magic he had access to. Minute by minute he maintained his focus and collected more and more in the node, several times he lost his focus and some leaked out but he just kept going. He thought his internal magic would start to run out but his wisdom was high enough to refill it after he grabbed some, while not fighting anyways.
Time slipped by and many thoughts started to cross his mind and he had to keep bringing his focus back to what he was doing, losing some progress each time. Some of his thoughts were very distracting, like why did moving magic in his body seem like a natural process to him, almost like he had done it before. Also, he felt like a lot of what he was doing was something he just knew in his gut was correct and he wasn't sure where this knowledge came from. Not having memories from before he was 12 kept bringing him back to outlandish explanations for all this that might give his abandonment at that young age more meaning. He kept pushing those thoughts aside and kept pushing forward with his progress, he could feel the node reaching some kind of limit and holding the magic in and adding more kept getting more and more difficult. Finally after what felt like a full 24 hours, it opened with a soul shattering pain.
"You have opened your Earth node to level - Body"
"Corresponding earth skill 'Smash' is now stronger with the inclusion of earth flavored magic"
"Your will can now impose this skill outside of your body"
"This effect is modified by your Will stat."
Then an unexpected window came up.
"You have now opened 2 nodes and can now progress past level 9, up to level 100."
"I didn't see that coming," Eli said out loud to himself. While scratching his chin he thought about what that meant, if you couldn't open 2 nodes you would be stuck at level 9, and he would need to open more nodes to reach beyond level 100. This could really limit him since many of his nodes did not respond to his attempts to open at all. At least from the playback the system gave him he knew he could open at least order, chaos, and shadow nodes since it said that him having those opposites was rare. He shook his head and smiled at the chance to take his new skill for a test drive and slowly climbed down the tree until he was about 30 feet from the ground. The monster was still there and Eli realized that he again had a choice to make. This monster was not acting aggressive, if he attacked first he might end up in a fight that he could have avoided, and even with his new upgrade he still thought it would be a difficult fight.
He decided to take a chance and jumped all the way to the ground about 10 feet away from the monster. It immediately turned to look at him with dull impassive leaves with eye-like markings on them, it then tilted its head to try and figure out what it was looking at. It seemed to finally understand and its body shifted lower to the ground as it prepared to leap at him. Eli didn't want to give it the chance and jumped forward in a flash preparing a smash with magic drawn from his newly opened earth node and even mixing in some of his normal internal magic for the attack. He didn't use much, it was just enough to make sure this thing would take some serious damage right from the beginning.
As his Bone mace made contact with the monster's face and the skill triggered, a loud "BOOM!" filled the dense jungle around him rustling leaves and causing a gust of wind. The monster was smashed into the ground, in fact, all the ground around the monster was smashed making a crater a foot deep and 4 feet wide. Its head, where the attack landed, liquified and splattered to the ground. His right hand and wrist were in a lot of pain and may have even broken from the force of that hit. Eli suddenly remembered to breathe as he stood there mouth wide open at how much stronger the skill was from before and how effective that had been. However his shock soon turned to concern as the monster was starting to piece itself back together, the bark and vines were reforming into the monster again.
Shocked and fascinated at this monstrous regeneration and at the damage it just took while remaining alive, not to mention his painfully bleeding hand and wrist, it took a second for Eli to get his bearings. And in that second he felt the monster push magic into the ground and small sharp roots stuck out of the ground and were heading for the back of his legs. Being a step behind meant that he was only able to move his left foot out of the way so his right calf got pierced by the thin roots. They stuck in a couple inches and started to twist up like springs ripping the muscle apart little by little causing so much pain that it was difficult to focus, but Eli had been fighting in pain since all this started and would not be slowed by it too much anymore.
Since the monster was still in the crater and he was now rooted to the ground where he hit it last time he wound up another swing and put the same magic into it. This hurt through the whole swing as he again smashed it to the ground crushing even more of it into plant goo. He thought about smashing the small roots and a small weak version of the smash skill hit them and they broke. That must have been what it meant by using that magic outside of his body and Eli got a smile on his face and just started smashing, ignoring the pain, until his right hand was so broken that he could not even hold his mace anymore. After some exhausted left-handed final swings he was finally able to win and the normal system windows appeared about killing it, but before he could even try to loot it, it started to melt into the ground and was being absorbed by the tree roots.
He felt off about how it died and he took out one of his regeneration patches and stuck it to his skin in hopes that his hand would be fixed before anything else showed up. Looking around while focusing his magical senses on what the ground was doing, the energy from the guardian was being drawn into the trees. This was not just happening to the nearby trees but to all the trees in his sensing range. There didn't seem to be any immediate danger so you checked out the system kill windows.
"Combat Complete"
"Experience Gained"
"Congratulations"
"Your magic level has increased from 8 to 9"
"You have received 1 stat point."
Watching his hand visibly knit itself back together from his patch boosted out-of-combat regeneration, he knew exactly where this point was going, resistance. Eli applied the point to resistance making his stats look like this:
"Stats: Strength 5, Reaction 5, Vitality 6, Intellect 3, Wisdom 5, Resistance 6, Will 31"
Again his Will had increased, he really felt like it was increasing due to him overcoming a challenge or maybe just opening a node so crudely. He was not sure but he did know that he still felt like he had more work to do. The more he pushed forward the longer the road to his goal felt, but he wasn't going to let it stop him. The system has only been here about 2 days and he was well on his way to power, but if he could move this fast, he was sure others could too. Others who had the tutorial information to help them, they might not have books of information but a pamphlet would be way more than he got. He renewed his resolve to get powerful before all the bad people got powerful and started dictatorships or monarchies of cruelty. He got ready to take off for the dungeon when another time warning appeared.
"Time to reach the dungeon: 3 hours."
This was a shock to Eli, who was certain he had around 10 hours left, not 3 hours. He checked his distance and arrow and it said he still had 10 miles to go and if they were old world miles, 3 hours would be a breeze. But these were new world miles which seemed to be 10 times the distance or more. While Eli was confident that he could run fast enough to cover the distance, he was not confident that he could do it in this dense jungle, so he immediately sped off.
Maneuvering through the trees and bushes wasn't difficult so he was thinking about the time disparity and how the effort to open his earth node seemed easier than he thought it should have been. It wasn't a tough trial or a dangerous undertaking, all it took was focus and time. Maybe focusing for that long was difficult but Eli had practice during combat missions he would be awake and working for 2 or 3 days without anything more than a power nap to keep him going. Or it could be that the fewer nodes you have open the easier it is to open new ones. Suddenly another thought struck him, he could feel all 10 of his nodes, but only 2 were open, meaning he had 8 left. But when the system was showing runes over his head, having order and chaos, shadow and light, were things so rare it had to mention them. This meant that not everyone had them, which also meant that if they didn't have them they wouldn't be able to open them.
Do I have 'ALL' of them, Eli thought as he kept moving quickly through the jungle. He was getting better at difficult terrain using his improved balance from his weapon skill to perform some stunning parkour. He knew that he had 10 nodes and was missing 1, 11 didn't seem like an even enough number, these things in nature usually have even-ish numbers, so it's probably like 12 or something. This meant that it was possible for someone out there to have all 12 of them and be some kind of super overpowered threat to his plans. He wanted to impose his will against a world of soon to be powerful evil, and if someone more powerful were to come along and challenge this, it could cause problems.
He cleared his mind and tried moving faster, pushing his strength reaction and will to their limits, which landed him face first into the dirt when his foot didn't rotate fast enough and got caught on a vine. He had been moving for about an hour so far and only had about 2 miles left with about 2 hours left, he pulled his face out of the sticky mud and sat on a large root near where he fell. Eli breathed deep and extended his senses, he needed one more fight to get to level 10 and figure out what all this trainee business means.