The Journey

After traveling half way to the abandoned stash, Caminus heard a concerning sound. Some animal was choosing to run towards him, it was the fire fox. Caminus drew on the knowledge of the dragons and brought to mind his knowledge of human fighting stances, and readied his small body for battle.

The fox knew that it was the aggressor and it had hidden well until it was within ten meters of its prey and launched its attack. The 1 meter long fox pounced with its 16 kilograms of weight spiralling through the air surrounded in an offensive red fire ball. Caminus' 20 kilogram body intercepted the fox using a sloppy fire shield technique that dissipated most of the force. Caminus' already hurt forearms took the rest of the attack and were burnt. Caminus knew he had to end this fight fast so he launched his own attack, opening his mouth he brought out a stream of red flame that surrounded the fire fox once more in flame. This time it was not the fire foxes own flames which were assimilated to its body, but Caminus' and left it seriously injured.

The fire fox new it could not win the fight after its first attack failed and it had sustained such injuries, so it turned to escape. Caminus did not have enough familiarity with his human form yet to close the distance and could only give up on the fox. After the first attack Caminus was confident he would kill it if it launched a second attack, he was prepared with another breath attack, but he could not launch the flame far enough to hit the escaping fox. Accepting the pain in his arms, Caminus continued on to his destination.

When Caminus reached the entrance he activated his essence and infused it into the hidden opening mechanism to enter the stash. The hidden stash must have belonged to a yellow flame cultivator and appeared to have been abandoned for over a hundred years due to the quality and state of the resources left behind. This was enough for Caminus; it would allow him to reach the orange flame stage. Closing the door behind him Caminus hid himself to once again begin cultivating in seclusion. The main cultivation material in the stash was lightly glowing rocks, called petram, which had concentrated essence power useful for any cultivator. These rocks were not only cultivation resources, but also a currency among cultivators. Caminus would need some of these for later in his plan when he would enter a sect. There were also some rarer more specialized resources for cultivating body toughness, the expert who had used this stash likely used a cultivation route that focused on body toughness. Caminus could use these to toughen his body, but they would not advance his cultivation. The stash had no resources specific to cultivating fire, but that was not trouble for Caminus as the petram was enough to get him well into the orange level.

The battle against the fox had shown his weakness, and Caminus was not willing to be sloppy in a fight. Before he began to increase his cultivation, Caminus focused on strengthening his body and training in human martial arts to be ready to fight effectively in his human body. After he went through a round of martial practice and body strengthening, Caminus would cultivate by infusing the essence from the petram rock into his essence and cycling it to assimilate and purify it within his body. After body strengthening and cultivating, Caminus then slept before waking up the next day to repeat this process. However, the next day when he woke up he was beginning to feel hungry.

Caminus needed to eat and there was no food in the stash. Caminus knew he must leave to hunt wild game. The territory was that of the fire fox so the local animals would probably be small and scarce. Caminus had no time to be searching for the animals so he set up traps at the edge and just beyond the fire foxes territory for small game and returned to his new training grounds. He then repeated his training regimen and before going to rest he went out to check his traps. He managed to catch some small local animals, enough to eat for several days, and combined it with some local fruits that grew near the path. Caminus then went to sleep to continue his training regimen, suspecting his dragon body had realized the flaw in the plan and helped to direct the animals to the traps and grow some fruit near the path by focusing essence in those areas. While Caminus trained his body's needs were met by conveniently fast growing fruit that was always along his path and small animals that fell into his crudely made traps. After several hundred days of training, Caminus finally used up all of the body strengthening resources and most of the petram.

Caminus' body now had the approximate maturity of a nine year old; the body strengthening resources had the added effect of aging him. His cultivation had reached well into the orange level and had retained the high quality that he insisted on as well. Caminus was ready to head out for the sect recruiting. The location of the recruitment test was 5 days travel and the recruitment started in 10. 300 gram of unused petram remained after his training, and Caminus needed to bring it with him, he would need 40 grams as the entrance fee for the recruitment test. Caminus made a bag for the petram out of animal hide, another for provisions and fashioned a loin cloth for himself as well. Remembering the fight against the fire fox, Caminus used the best of the animal skins to make himself a pair of bracers for his forearms so that he would be less likely to be injured in battle. There were no other resources worth taking, so Caminus set out for the sect recruitment.

Caminus chose to take a path that would keep him away from any other people until he arrived at the village next to the recruitment spot. He used the time on the journey to practice forming words with his human mouth. Caminus had been doing this for a while, and he knew he was going to have to speak with humans soon, so he wanted to be able to speak effortlessly, like he had spoken to people before, that way he would be better able to get information and not be known as a savage.

Alone the way when he was practicing his introduction of himself a hunter outside of his cultivation stumbled upon his path. Venandi, the hunter, heard someone talking, and upon investigating saw a strange kid talking to himself, claiming to have an orange flame cultivation. Venandi knew the area was dangerous for children, it had plenty of red level beasts around, and he had seen children playing like they could beat any of them and pretending they had an orange level cultivation. He himself had a red cultivation but he knew stealth and tracking so he was not in any danger. Having recently killed the previous beast who claimed this territory, a spikey squirrel, Venandi decided to first scare the kid before bringing him to safety.

Sneaking along the side of the path Venandi mimicked the sound of the spiked squirrel to scare the child. The child however did not respond at all, so he snuck along a little further and a couple minutes later mimicked the sound of a particularly nasty beast with a loud growl, a Gorrul. The child responded this time, he stopped talking and looked in Venandi's direction quizzically. Venandi took the opportunity to growl once again, louder and made the sound of movement among the brush. Thinking the child would either start running, or would have a serious lack of survival instincts Venandi was happy with himself. However the child did something unexpected, he sent a large bellow of orange flame that travelled ten meters out of his mouth and then let out an even louder growl towards Venandi scaring him away. Venandi was now sure this child could protect himself and ran quickly, not wanting to be taken as a Gorrul.

While Venandi was running to safety, Caminus wondered to himself why the animals in this area were so agitated, and also curious that he heard a Gorrul when their usual territory was twenty kilometers away. Caminus continued on his way asking out loud, "why did that Gorrul come down from the mountain?" As there was no one left to hear him his question remained unanswered. He continued travelling and stopped talking to himself when he was only a couple hours out from the village.

As Caminus approached the village it was early morning, the villagers were moving around the village getting ready for the day. Caminus did notice that there were several men in the village who appeared to be hunters that were just appearing busy but accomplishing little of importance and constantly looking up from their tasks. A few of these village hunters looked at him as he approached. Examining them; Caminus noticed that they were all of at least the red level of cultivation and three of them were orange level. Each of them had some weapon nearby, within arm's reach. They must have been expecting people to come through for the recruitment, which means they are aware of it. Still Caminus kept on guard in case they were up to something besides protecting the village. As he entered the village an older man with no cultivation approached him, "You must be here for the recruitment, if you have anything for trade you can trade in the daylight, but you must leave the town by nightfall, the other children who have arrived set up shelter in the valley where the recruitment is happening."