Ascension of the Primalist [A Tamer Class, LitRPG]

Seth remained seated like a silent sentinel in the center of the frozen sanctum, his left arm extended out into the biting air. He didn't need to rebuild the entire architecture of Aetheric Bow to make the spell stronger with the Null affinity; the structural integrity of the bow's limbs and the tension of the aetheric string were already optimal. His focus narrowed entirely on the arrows that were produced by the spell's grooves.

Seth closed his eyes, and the cavern vanished as his consciousness sank inward.

The familiar swirl of his Well rose to meet him—restless, shifting, alive with currents of aether that twisted around one another in a constant, silent storm. He let himself drift deeper, past the layered hum of the Darkness, Earth, and Poison affinity as he searched for something more hushed.

Something wrong.

There, he thought.

A pocket of absence in his Well where sensation had been stripped away. Without missing a beat, he reached for it.

Memories came with it—moments he had felt that paradoxical energy before. There'd been the brief instant between realms, when entering or leaving a Rift, where the world's heartbeat stuttered into nothing. There was also the suffocating stillness of the Null Sap, seeping through his channels, stripping away every trace of elemental noise until only a terrifying yet peaceful clarity remained.

The silence sharpened, then his mind focused on the feeling of his unnamed aura spell, visualizing as it pulled in and consumed everything.

Energy collapsed inward, was dragged down, and broke apart until only a tightening, hungry pull remained.

The Null affinity functioned as the ultimate reductionist force. It stripped aether of its complexities, grinding it down to its most primal, naked component until it created a predatory tug. The affinity itself was a hole in the fabric of the aetheric weave.

The world seemed to loathe this emptiness. Just as the crushing weight of the deep ocean rushes with violent intent to fill the space where a pocket of air had collapsed, the surrounding elemental affinities fought to flood any area where Seth's Null energy resided. It was a starving emptiness that demanded to be filled.

Seth held onto that feeling—the pull, the hunger—and turned his inner sight toward the grooves of Aetheric Bow. He could feel the aetheric pathways that dictated the summoning of the arrow: how the blueprint stretched and sharpened the energy into something fast and lethal.

He ignored the structural anchors and moved instead to the secondary channels that imprinted the projectile with its blue, neutral, elemental "flavor."

The contrast with the grooves of his Null-aura spell was stark. Where Night Veil brushed against his senses like cold, slick velvet, and the signatures of shadows and Armored Phantom Fists pressed in like rigid, unyielding stone, the Null spell offered nothing at all. No texture. No temperature. Only a steady, pulsing lack of sensation—a throbbing void that made his senses almost recoil.

Seth turned the problem over in his mind.

He had formed those Null grooves out of a desperate, primal desire to absorb every drop of the Petrified Tree's sap. Trying to apply that same logic to shape a projectile presented a dangerous paradox.

If he converted the summoning channel entirely to a Null affinity, the vacuum would form too soon. The moment the aether gathered and took shape, it would devour everything around it before it could ever harden into an arrow. He would be pulling a bowstring of light, only to have the projectile evaporate into a puff of non-existence before it even left his fingers.

Seth's mental focus sharpened as the strain began to draw beads of sweat from his forehead.

Can I strip only the affinity inside the arrow?

If he could preserve the outer shell—keep the structure stable—then hollow out its inner part… it might become a formidable weapon. A shard of aether that devoured on impact and collapsed inward the moment its casing broke.

His Well churned in response, as if the thought itself stirred it.

Seth looked inward, tracing the delicate grooves of Aetheric Bow, his mind focusing on the segment that shaped the arrow. The theory held, but the execution… He needed the arrow to exist and not exist at the same time. A stable form wrapped around an absence. That felt impossible.

And it didn't even account for weaving in an affinity he barely understood.

Frustration crept in.

He narrowed his attention further, trying to peel the neutral affinity of the inside of the spell's grooves. But the energy refused to separate. It slipped through his grasp with a stubborn persistence.

Like nature itself, aether resisted any form of emptiness.

For long minutes he tried again and again—stretching, isolating, forcing the distinction—but the neutral affinity clung to the structure, refusing to vanish. The task felt… ill-defined. Too abstract. As if he were trying to carve absence out of something that, by its very essence, refused to be blank.

Seth finally gave up and reached into his pouch for the worn leather-bound book Professor Reat had given him: Eldric's Aetheric Theory.

Maybe I'll find something in there, he thought.

Without wasting time, he flipped through the familiar parchment pages, eyes darting across diagrams and runic stabilization. He had memorized these chapters months ago, yet he searched them once again for a hidden spark of insight. The section on spell modification remained as superficial as he remembered it—a short guide on how to increase potency, extend duration, or shift a single-burst spell like Phantom Punch into a sustained state. It offered countless ways to refine a spell, yet it provided nothing on how to fundamentally rewrite its very nature with a different affinity.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Seth sighed and closed the book shut, the dull thud echoing through the cavern. If even that renowned Scholar had no answer, then he would have to find one himself somewhere else. Somewhere only he could reach.

He turned his focus inward once more.

But this time, he went past the calmness of his Well and plunged down into the churning heart of his core. There, the fierce energy of his Legacy pulsed with a life of its own. It coiled and surged like something caged against its will. This was the force that had allowed him to evolve and improve his spells countless times. There had to be a secret.

Without a second thought, he sank into it.

Crimson mist swallowed his awareness as the energy roared against his mind. Yet beneath the savagery, he felt something else. A bond. A bridge stretching far below, into a depth of his Well he had never noticed before.

Seth followed it.

What he found made his breath catch.

Hidden in the darkest reaches of his inner world was a small yet powerful stream of heat wrapped in chains so vast they vanished into shadow. Warmth radiated from it, accompanied by a presence he could not see—one that made the hair on his arms rise.

Absolute. Relentless.

Memory surged through Seth’s mind.

Back in the Desert of Misery, when he had first learned Primal Rage, he had felt something similar for only a fleeting instant before his core had used the thing to transform the spell into Beastmaster Rage.

Has it been bonded to my core since then?

The thought sent a shiver through him.

He reached toward the hidden energy with care, brushing against it through the chains. It felt nothing like the violent storm of his Legacy's Fierce Instincts. This force was different. It did not rage or thrash. It carried the certainty of something that would never kneel, never break, no matter how many ages passed.

Seth steadied himself and peeled away the noise of his core’s fury, clearing his awareness until he could focus entirely on the power leaking through the chains.

Then he felt it.

An intent.

A single, unyielding drive. If his core embodied the instinct of a predator that needed to conquer and tear through anything that dared stand in its way, this was all about the refusal to be denied. As if the very act of breathing existed only to push forward, to advance, and no limit or obstacle could ever stop it. Growth required only one thing: the will to seize it.

Seth’s breathing stopped, the realization striking him like a punch.

That was where he had been wrong.

He didn't need to delicately remove the neutral affinity from the spell. That Path was flawed from the start.

He needed to replace it. Overwrite it entirely with a new purpose.

Seth's focus snapped back to the arrow's summoning grooves. This time, he didn't try to carve out everything and leave nothing behind; he flooded the channels with a whole different reason to exist, forcing the structure to bend around his commands.

Absorb. Pierce. Consume.

He poured the feeling of being cornered by something stronger into the grooves—the cold despair of a beast with no choice but to use the devouring nature of the Null affinity or die. He envisioned an attack that would ignore the aetheric density of flesh and the shimmering protection of barriers. An attack with no affinity that could devour anything that tried to block it

It had to become something that did not clash, did not collide—only consumed.

To strike and never be stopped. To exist and fly by feeding on the medium it traveled through. To end by leaving nothing behind but silence.

The sensation coiled through Seth, sharp and intoxicating. It carried the purpose of a predator that moved with such absolute certainty that the world itself had no choice but to yield.

To ensure the arrow bore that purpose, he needed it to pierce and consume everything it met, turning the enemy's own aether into fuel.

Within him, the grooves began to change. They no longer followed the rigid, sterile patterns of the neutral affinity and started to pulse with the rhythm of Seth's heartbeat instead.

A spark of aether and they would begin to feast.

The following three days blurred into the cold stillness of the cavern and deep mental exhaustion. Seth remained seated on the permafrost of the floor, his mind still locked within the landscape of his aether channels. He obsessively smoothed the new grooves of his spell over and over, stripping away the lingering echoes of neutral aether and replacing them with a ravenous intent. He refined the pathways until the desire to absorb and consume felt so intense that he couldn't fathom it being any purer.

Seth then finally pushed himself up. His joints popped with the protest of long-held stillness, and his stomach churned from not having had food for twenty-four hours, but his mind was vibrantly clear. He glanced toward Elena, who was still draped in the fur jacket, her face serene as she continued the slow, methodical process of bonding with the Frigid Tulip. After cracking a smile, Seth turned his attention to the frozen boulder fifty yards away, where his previous blue arrows had left shallow craters.

He extended his left arm. With a single thought, he summoned the Aetheric Bow. The weapon manifested in a shimmer of light, but the blue was now paled to a ghostly, translucent cerulean.

Even though Seth had only slightly modified the bow's actual structure to withstand the new projectile, the weapon seemed to hum with an agitated energy, as if sensing the change in the projectile he would notch—that was where the real change had come.

Seth reached back, and his right hand moved with a slow, deliberate focus as he began the process of summoning the altered arrow.

Energy surged from his Well, but when it entered the newly forged grooves, Seth didn't let it simply flow. He guided every spark, using each curve and line as filters that tore away the elemental affinities and impurities. He forced the aether through the new hungry trenches, stripping the energy until only the fierce, primal desire to never be stopped remained.

The process was grueling, and for several minutes Seth stood still, his brow glistening with sweat as he manually steered the aether through the spell's structure.

Finally, the arrow materialized between his fingers.

The projectile was nearly colorless, possessing a pallid, faded quality that made it look almost non-existent. It wasn't the brilliant, blinding white of Light aether; rather, it was a dim, ethereal sliver that seemed to want to vanish from reality altogether.

Yet the sensation it projected was the opposite of subtle.

The air around the arrow blurred and warped as it pulled at every particle of aether nearby, tearing at its surroundings to feed its own existence. The intensity of the vacuum was so high, it created a faint, high-pitched whistling sound.

Seth notched the pallid projectile and pulled the bowstring of the cerulean weapon until the aetheric cord groaned. Drawing in a deep breath, he took aim at the center of the scarred boulder and then loosed the string.

The arrow tore through the cave with a violent hiss, a streak of "nothingness" that seemed to leave a trail of distorted reality fabric in its wake. A split-second later, it struck the boulder with a dull crack.

Unlike standard arrows that had exploded on impact in a flashy display, this one simply pierced. It sank deep into the frosted stone as if the boulder offered no more resistance than water and disappeared from sight to lodge itself deep inside.

Seth watched, his breath held in his lungs, then the massive chunk of ice-covered rock began to shudder. Small, jagged cracks spiderwebbed outward from the entry point, hinting that the internal structure of the boulder had been broken from the inside, and with a final groan, it crumbled into a heap of chunks.

Seth stared at the wreckage for a moment, arm still raised. "Holy shit," he breathed, before lowering the bow and focusing on his hand to see the new information of the spell.

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