The Painted Wastes.

When Elijah had first heard that name, he’d questioned whether it was figurative or literal. As he stood atop the enormous cliff overlooking the region, he knew the answer. A vast expanse of cracked desert stretched toward the horizon. In some ways, it looked much like the Badwater Basin in California’s Death Valley. Vast stretches of land featured similar desiccation cracks that formed polygonal patterns.

However, from those cracks rose a rainbow of light that, from afar, made the entire region look like a watercolor painting. In the distance, Elijah saw a handful of rock formations made of the same sandstone from which he’d made his dolmen. The red-and-white striations contributed to the surreality of the landscape.

In short, the Painted Wastes were well-named.

And Elijah could feel the intense waves of heat even from more than a thousand feet above the basin. The ambient ethera had continued to rise as well, and to the point where it had already reached a level comparable to the area around the Labyrinth of Dead Gods.

Elijah expected that he was still a long way from the entrance, too – at least according to the rough estimate supplied by Seattle’s expedition. They’d claimed it was thousands of miles away, and from Elijah’s calculations, he’d only covered about fifteen hundred miles. Maybe two thousand.

He still had a ways to go.

Idly, he hacked a wasp apart as it dove in an effort to impale him. The things were everywhere. Mostly, they left him alone, but every now and then, one of the stronger among them would attack. He made examples of those suicidal creatures.

Thankfully, most of them weren’t any larger than a beagle – not including stingers or wings. Enormous for wasps, but not big enough to cause true alarm.

He’d been dealing with them for the past week as he slowly put distance between himself and his dolmen. He could move pretty quickly, but the combination of the wasps, which prevented flight, and the steep dunes had served to slow his pace by a considerable degree.

Along the way, he’d seen a few ruined cities. A couple had clearly been Hawaiian, but he’d also found the remnants of a military base that he thought might have been located in Guam. He also discovered a few cities whose origin he couldn’t quite determine, largely because they were mostly buried beneath the dunes. He assumed they were other Pacific islands, but there was no way he could know for certain.

And after what he’d experienced in Honolulu, he didn’t really want to investigate. The scale of death was staggering, and though Elijah could rationally understand the numbers involved – tens of millions at the lowest estimates – seeing it firsthand wasn’t something he wanted to experience.

So, eventually, he just stopped looking.

He felt callous for doing so, but if he gave every city the same treatment he’d afforded Honolulu, he’d have spent years in the effort. Not only could the world not afford that, but he didn’t think his sanity would survive.

Thankfully, he’d found that his garnet mind was uniquely suited to dealing with trauma. After finishing his dolmen, he’d spent a few days exploring its capabilities, and he’d come away feeling better about his present and his future. As he’d expected when he’d created the imagery involved, he could discard trauma-stricken leaves at will. Doing so required that he address the cause of said trauma, but it was much better than experiencing it all at once next time he chose to upgrade his cultivation.

And it stopped the corruption, which was important.

Once a leaf had fallen, a new one grew in its place. It didn’t reach full functionality for a few days, but once it was formed, it worked exactly the same as any other.

“Who needs therapy?” he wondered aloud as he knelt on the cliff. “Not this guy, that’s for sure.”

Then, he leaped into open air and plummeted more than a thousand feet. The ground cracked when he landed, but he was entirely unharmed – which suggested that he could survive a fall at terminal velocity. That was nice to know, but unsurprising.

Still, the shock of it did send a jolt of pain through his knees, so he didn’t intend to make a habit of it. Thankfully, that faded after a quick pulse of Wild Resurgence, and soon enough, he was trekking across the Painted Wastes.

It took him a few minutes to reach the cracked earth, and when he did, he found that the rainbow lights weren’t nearly as visible up close. They still set the air to shimmering with a subtle tint cycling between myriad colors, but it was easily ignorable. What he could not ignore was the sudden spike in the air temperature.

If it was less than two hundred degrees, he would have been extremely surprised.

Even though his inflated constitution attribute meant that he had no issues enduring the heat, it did nothing to stop the sweat from pouring down his body. In addition, the sun’s rays seemed stronger than ever, and in only an hour, his exposed skin had turned red. To mitigate that, he kept Wild Resurgence going.

It did leave him hoping that skin cancer was no longer a credible risk, though.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Either way, Elijah was thankful when the sun began to set. As it did, he found shelter next to one of the rocky outcroppings, where he pitched his tent. Once it had been deployed, he took a short shower and slipped inside.

The tent’s climate control, though fairly weak, was a welcome addition which allowed him to truly relax for the first time since he’d descended into the Painted Wastes.

That lasted right up until he felt the predators outside.

From Soul of the Wild, Elijah determined that they were coyotes, though much larger than any that had existed before Earth had been touched by the World Tree. These were slightly larger than wolves, which was quite an increase in size. More importantly, they were obviously hungry.

Thankfully, the tent featured some subtle defenses. There were no shields, but rather, those defensive measures focused on avoiding notice. So, after only a few minutes of sniffing around, the coyotes moved on to more obvious prey.

Those were the first visitors, but they certainly weren’t the last. Throughout the night, a multitude of animals ranging from coyotes to large wolf spiders passed the tent. Elijah tried to ignore them, but these creatures felt slightly different than any others he’d encountered.

They weren’t monsters. Of that, he was certain. But for lack of a better way of putting it, they felt incredibly territorial. Or arrogant. Maybe prideful. Whatever word he used to describe it, their nature was in evidence when multiple fights broke out. By midnight, the air was full of pained yowls, angry hisses, and warning screeches.

The resulting cacophony made it almost impossible to sleep.

So, the next morning, he was more than a little cranky. Fortunately, he didn’t exit the tent to see a battlefield strewn with corpses, as he’d half-expected to find. Instead, he only found a single dead coyote, its throat brutally ripped out.

Elijah ignored it.

Soon enough, he was moving on.

Over the next couple of days, he found more of the same. The endless expanse of nothingness was both nerve-wracking and tediously boring. The ever-present threat of the wasps remained, though their swarms grew much larger and more diverse. Some of the wasps were no larger than they’d been back on Earth, but they traveled in swarms of thousands. Others were much, much larger, with some even reaching human sizes.

Still, he had to admit that, deep down, he just wanted to scour them from the face of the Earth. Something about those wasps incited an irrational annoyance that bordered on hatred.

They weren’t just nuisances. Rather, it felt like Elijah was dealing with the last vestiges of an infestation he’d been fighting for years. To say he wanted to exterminate them was an understatement of the most egregious sort.

He ignored those feelings.

The last thing he needed was to become embroiled in a never-ending fight against a nearly innumerable enemy. The wasps weren’t just common. They were a ubiquitous threat from which there was no real escape.

The only reason Elijah hadn’t already been forced into battle was because they could clearly sense his power. But the second their own instincts told them they could beat him, they would attack. To avoid having to deal with them, Elijah shifted into the Shape of the Scourge and adopted the Guise of the Unseen.

Under that cloak of stealth, he continued on.

Each night featured another territorial battle, while every day was filled with heat, sweat, and wasps.

Along the way, Elijah decided to put some of his desert survival skills to the test. His supplies weren’t infinite, so he wanted to stretch them as far as he could. To that end, he searched for water. The problem was that he’d never really been forced to endure such an environment, so most of his so-called skills were half-recalled memories from watching internet videos during college.

Which was to say that they were almost nonexistent.

Still, there were some common sense steps he could take. For instance, he could watch the local wildlife – such as they existed – for signs of water. During the day, there were only the wasps, but there were plenty of animals that came out at night. And they had to have a water source.

So, he endeavored to spend a single night outdoors. Maintaining Guise of the Unseen, he watched the battle unfold. And it was an odd thing to watch. Every animal seemed to regard the others as intruders into their territory. Because of that, fights were common.

Elijah watched as giant wolf spiders wrestled with mountain lions and coyotes. Monstrous beetles rammed antelope-like creatures. There were even camels kicking for all they were worth.

And when morning came, they all slunk back to their lairs. Elijah followed a group of coyotes to a cave located within one of the red-and-white outcroppings. The opening was cleverly concealed behind a switchback that, in turn, was hidden by a particularly turbulent rainbow vent.

If Elijah hadn’t seen the coyotes enter, he might not have even thought to look deeper. Now that he had, it seemed obvious. He followed the pack of coyotes inside, only to find that it led to a tunnel that clearly ended up in the Hollow Depths. The coyotes didn’t stop for more than an hour.

When they did halt, it was next to a small pool of water. Bones of small game were scattered close to shore, proving that the coyotes had been living there for some time. After they drank their fill, the canines settled down into a huge pile and went to sleep.

Elijah let them be.

He didn’t even refill his canteens at the spring. But now that he knew what to look for, he felt certain that he could find another entrance to the Hollow Depths. He could find more water – a comforting thought for a man trekking through the harshest of deserts.

Elijah retreated, eventually finding his way back to the Painted Wastes where he resumed his journey. The next day, he found another entrance. This one was untended, but after only a couple of hours, it led to a deep underground spring. Elijah took that opportunity to refill his canteens, and he found some edible lichen that he harvested to add some variety to his diet.

He still had plenty of food in the Arcane Loop, but he’d learned to take what he could while he could. Because he had no idea when he might find himself in an unforgiving and hostile environment.

Like that, Elijah kept going for nearly a week more.

The Painted Wastes grew harsher with each passing hour. Soon, the temperatures climbed to the point where Elijah was certain that only Earth’s elites could survive. The ethera levels had continued to rise as well, hinting that he only needed to go a little further if he wanted to reach the Primal Realm.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than he saw a particularly large swarm of wasps coming in his direction. At first, Elijah thought they were just like all the others, but their path was too straight. The others typically moved erratically, zipping around in patterns only insects could understand.

But this new group?

They were coming for him.

And rather than allow himself to feel the fear such a fact should have elicited, Elijah found himself looking forward to the confrontation. He embraced his instinctive hatred of those wasps and readied himself for the coming battle.