Novaris: Adventure in the Shattered Fang Continent

Novaris. Quattur. 905. AGC.

Nodel. Waning Crescent 🌘. Day 27.

The next day, Tesilim woke up with a bit of a goat hangover as he had spent most of the last night out drinking idiots in the tavern. Tesilim wasn’t sure how the next month would go, but there wasn’t much he could do about it.

So, he headed over to the teleportation circle and enhanced his body jumping by the circle on the wall and activating it in order to be taken to the dining hall. The hall was a large room that should not have been able to fit inside the tree, but it still did. Like the rest of the inn, the hall followed the same decorating scheme. All the furniture grew from the floor with emerald green cushions, and the entire place had green lawn-like carpet.

The hall had more space to decorate, which meant the walls were filled with flowers, flowerpots, paintings, and other natural decorations like wooden statues and carvings. One side of the hall had what was essentially a serve-yourself section filled with all kinds of foods, though there was only a little meat since the place did belong to a vegan.

Eating his fill of meat and fruits, Tesilim decided to explore the rest of the inn before heading over to Lili’s place.

After the dining hall, Tesilim headed to the gym area and was shocked to find an even larger area than the dining hall by about three times. It was the size of two baseball fields, which was saying a lot. The room had all sorts of contraptions for agility and strength training and even a few pools. It was also rather empty, with only a dozen or so people in the place as mostly everyone was still eating. The most surprising thing was that the place still had wooden walls, though at some point, the wood ended, and it melded into a view of the sky, which explained where all the light was coming from.

Next up on the exploration list was the laundry room, which resembled a typical laundry room on Earth. It had a bunch of holes on the wall with lids, though the metal buttons were replaced with runic symbols. Moving on from there, Tesilim visited the bathroom and spa room, which were connected.

In the bathroom and spa area, Tesilim found some pretty green-haired and green-skinned ladies wearing dresses made of dark green leaves. The ladies had beautiful, vibrant green eyes and giggled at his goat form.

The sweet-sounding ladies, who were obviously dryads, could understand him even without a spell and giggled even harder when he explained his situation. Thankfully, they were nice dryads and offered to wash and massage his goat body, which Tesilim quickly agreed to, seeing as he couldn’t do it himself.

After getting the best massage and wash of his goat life, Tesilim left the bathroom area with the dryads promising to wash him whenever he wanted, goat body or no goat body. Leaving the beautiful ladies giggling, Tesilim teleported to the lobby, where he met Grover, who motioned for him to follow. Then the satyr fucking walked through the counter's back wall!

Jumping over the counter, Tesilim quickly walked through the wall, finding himself in a beautiful grove of trees. The place felt like the perfect forest, and everything felt right and alive. The birds chirped, a breeze blew, and a lovely flute tune floated through the trees as warm light came from the green sky. That caused Tesilim to double-take, but he was quickly reoccupied when Grover coughed politely before pointing at a beautiful-looking light green-skinned lady with pointy elf ears. The dryad left the dryads at the bath in the dust in terms of beauty, and her leaf dress sprawled on the floor around her, covering half of the trunk she was sitting on. Her eyes were orbs of light green, and her hair was wavy green and melded to a small root crown that rested above her forehead.

Nervously walking to the dryad and coming to a stop some 30 feet from her, Tesilim heard the woman's sweet voice that, for just a second, sounded more like the rustling of leaves than actual speech.

“Hello, Tesilim. Come,” the dryad motioned him forward, and he slowly approached the woman.

“Ba?” Tesilim questioned worryingly.

“It's alright. I simply want to speak with you. My name is Jolly Joyleaf, and I am the owner of the inn.”

Hearing that, Tesilim's nerves quickly disappeared, and he happily trotted to the woman, stopping right in front of her.

“I have heard what happened to you and have been watching you since.”

“Baa?”

Smiling, the dryad answered. “Yes, that is a bit creepy, as you put it, but it is part of the price of staying here.”

“Baaa.”

“You will be fine. I have no interest in getting with someone so young. Plus, you have nothing I haven’t seen much bigger samples of. You do understand that I have a centaur and minotaur sleeping here, right?”

“Baaaaaaa,” Tesilim answered, lowering his goat head like he had just been hit in the gut. The action caused the dryad to giggle, and she continued on.

“I called you here because I want to make a deal.” This line got Tesilim's attention instantly, and for once, he didn’t interrupt as the woman continued. “Though I can see all within my domain, if I peer into a creature's soul, they will notice. And doing so may actually cause me to lose customers so I avoid it. So, if you allow me to peer into yours and take a look at how this magic of yours works, I will allow you to stay here for the rest of the month for free.”

“Baaaaaaaaa, baaaa, baaaaaa.”

“I see; so the Vinci kid had such a reaction to seeing this thing, and you are worried I will kidnap you or worse?”

“Ba.”

“Alright, well, how about this? I will swear on Amphis not to do such a thing, and additionally, you may stay here for free until you leave the city for good. Is that a better deal?”

“Baaa?”

“Amphis is the Goddess of Nature.”

“Ba.”

“Great, so we have a deal! Now, don’t worry. I won't intrude too much.”

Then Tesilim felt weird like something was crawling under his skin.

Looking into the elf-turned-goat’s soul, Jolly found everything to be mostly the same. Well, except for the rainbow liquid gushing about in his inner core.

The mana was frightening. Jolly was an S Rank dryad, and the energy in the elf’s soul was something else. It was as if she was staring at an ocean of possibilities, all just as likely to come true as any other. However, it didn’t act like the Chaos Mana her mother had spoken of. That Chaos Mana was found in the Astral and was unpredictable and incredibly powerful. Her mother had spoken about how if a chain reaction occurred, whole new solar systems could be created.

The thing was that this Chaos Mana in the elf's soul was more tamed and restructured. It still had near limitless possibilities, except the scope went down, and so did the power. Instead of solar systems, the mana could cause a mountain to fall from the sky or maybe turn the elf into a goat.

It was an interesting thing, and Jolly wanted to learn more about it, but she could feel the D Ranker was on the verge of passing out, so she pulled out of the soul. Then she flicked her will and healed the lad while teleporting him to the lobby and depositing his 30 gold back in the pouch.

Tesilim had been feeling rather woozy and was on the verge of passing out when he blinked, and felt a whole lot better, but more importantly, he was back in the lobby. Not wanting to question stuff too much, he gave the best goat shrug he could and left the inn, making his way to Lili’s shop.

“Baaaaaaaaaaaa!” Tesilim screamed as a fucking tiger was chasing him through the goddamn city. Where had the tiger even come from? What the hell was going on!? These were the only thoughts on Tesilim’s mind as he enhanced his body to the fullest and was still unable to lose the damn thing.

Eventually, he made it to Lili’s with the tiger hot on his heels. However, his fear was quickly replaced by anger as he saw Alyx and Lili outside of the shop looking in his direction while laughing their asses off.

“Baaa!” or “Motherfuckers!” Was what Tesilim shouted as he tried to slam into his two companions, only for them to dodge at the last second, causing him to eat dirt.

Getting up and looking back at the two, he saw the tiger that had been chasing him transform into a pretty bronze-skinned elf with green hair who also joined in on the “laugh at Tesilim's session.” Tesilim, in turn, just “Baaa!” at them as he cursed them out to hell and back.

Eventually, the three idiots stopped laughing, and Lili thanked the elf for her help in the prank. The woman morphed into an eagle and flew away, leaving Tesilim staring at her.

“Come on, goat boy. Let's get inside,” Lili said as she headed inside, followed by Alyx.

Tesilim did so but was definitely planning some revenge.

After that, Tesilim spent the rest of the day reading more magic books. Apparently, just because he couldn’t fight didn’t mean he couldn’t read and better understand magic.

That's how most of his goat days were going to be spent, along with some more presence training from Lili. She even decided to begin teaching him how to use the supposed sub-enhancements, though just the very basics.

Essentially, it was just focusing the enhancement spell in certain areas and applying your will, so it did something different. The whole thing basically worked through will and imagination but was much more limited. Sub-enhancements were simple things like enhancing vision, hearing, and smell or making it so you could climb on walls or resist slipping on oily surfaces. They could even be extended to water walking, which was neat.

Truthfully, Tesilim mainly wanted to be a goat climbing on ceilings, which was totally going to happen before his transformation ended.

Spider Goat was coming no matter what happened.