Avery watched with a bemused smile as the Owner scoured the land in his search for the Elder. His quest had lasted for almost ten years, and he was finally reaching his goal.
He had been unlucky, and had passed by the Elder twice, missing him by no more than a few kilometers. Ironically, his initial group had been lucky enough to meet the Elder a few years ago. It was a cruel trick of fate, as he would have been better off simply continuing to live his peaceful life with his companions.
Instead, he had gone through unimaginable trials and tribulations, facing death at every turn, only to fail to achieve his goal for a decade. He had been pushed to his limit over and over again, and only his sheer determination to succeed had kept him going.
Being approximately 30 years old, the Owner was still relatively young, but he had already experienced more than ninety percent of this world's living creatures. Not only that, but he had also achieved a mastery of fighting that had never been reached before.
He had slowly evolved from a hopeless rookie unable to follow what was happening during a fight, only blindly reacting to pain with no strategy whatsoever to a seasoned veteran.
He did not have a very creative imagination, so he did not pioneer any new methods of fighting with the magical fragment. After the first few weeks, the only thing he ever asked for was strength. He simply never found anything more beneficial and reliable than brute force.
However, while his prayers were simple, what he did with them was anything but primitive. By virtue of a decade of experience and thousands of life and death fights, he had honed his fighting techniques to a never seen before peak. Then again, he was the first of his kind to dedicate himself to this hunting style.
His fighting style was unique. In gaming terms, it was an odd mix of an assassin’s and paladin's role. He focused mainly on explosive surprise attacks, hoping to finish any battles as quickly as possible. If they dragged on, he would then rely on the great speed and agility of his tentacles to perform precise attacks and keep the enemy at bay. All of this of course was fueled by his prayers to the magical fragment, which gave him the strength to measure up to even the fiercest predators.
He would lay in ambush, covering his tentacles with dirt to camouflage them. He would then wait patiently, while praying to be granted power. Only when prey came in his range would he act, unleashing a series of magically empowered attacks at their weak points. These last few years, he had gotten exceptionally good at this, and most of his fights were finished in one hit.
When he faced prey with too thick a hide, who were too resistant to blunt force, he would instead immobilise them before destroying their internal organs with powerful vibrations.
His control over the magical strength he received had also improved greatly. Now, he no longer empowered his entire body, as this was too exhausting and completely unsustainable. He was now able to enhance only a specific part of his body, to minimise the cost while maximising the benefits.
Besides that, the most striking growth he had experienced was in his battle techniques. He had gotten much more cunning, but contrary to the general trend of his species, he did not use his intelligence to build clever traps. Instead he used the full calculation power of his nine brains to analyse his opponents movements, to predict his next actions and determine what weak points he had.
With how skilled he had gotten at the art of killing, he was now the uncrowned King of the Plains. The only thing that could still pose a serious threat to him were predators that lived in packs. However, after the first few close calls, he had learned to hide and avoid them, only to strike back whenever they scattered.
It had been months since he had gotten slightly close to dying of thirst and starvation, as his growing strength also allowed him to travel faster, reaching whatever prey and water he needed faster.
Avery found watching the Owners adventures incredibly cathartic. It was like watching your cute pet run around the house, it was adorable.
It wasn’t only a matter of being entertained. Seeing the vigorous world full of energy and life was soothing his soul, and the loneliness that had unknowingly built up over the past decades was slowly abating.
On the surface everything was going perfectly well, and he had never felt better. Deep down, however, he just couldn't shake the feeling that something was very wrong with him.
He knew that the mental world was currently dominating his existence, and everything else was insignificant. He knew he had changed, and had thought he had easily accepted that. He was a God looking down upon his world, and had started to treat everything in it with a certain level of indifference. That was who he was, and it did not matter what he had been before.
What he had failed to realise was that the changes he was undergoing were not finished. Now, his thoughts were no longer influenced by his hormones or things like that, but by the state of his world.
One example of that were his views on the Sil’piceus. He remembered he had found their forms repulsive, and had ardently wished for another more aesthetically pleasing race to replace them as the main intelligent species of the world.
However, as time went by, he was beginning to find his earlier thoughts ridiculous. Now, he actually found them very cute, with how they waved around those beautiful tentacles of theirs.
This was more than just getting used to the appearance of the creature. This was his aesthetic preferences actively being modified to suit the general trend of his world. He was pretty sure that if a race of slugs evolved to dominate the world, then he would find them the pinnacle of beauty.
The idea of his thought being modified uncontrollably was scary enough, but that was not all. What disturbed him even more was how parts of his new mentality were incompatible with the values he had built up during his life on earth.
