"How are you doing?" I asked softly while gently poking Fay''s side with just the tip of my finger.


    That much was absolutely necessary, given how much she liked to focus on driving when we were… well, driving.


    Putting her foot on the brakes, Fay slowed the buggy down to a mere crawl before raising her eyes and taking a moment to think.


    "I think I''m good?" she replied, struggling to give a concrete,prehensive, and assured answer after a mere moment of self-check-up. "What about you?"


    ''Is it a good sign that even such a simple question is enough to fill me with happiness?'' I asked myself when I sensed my skin prickle up as a wave of distant, slight pleasure moved up my spine.


    "I''m perfectly fine," I replied, only to turn my smile into a slight grimace. "Or so I would be if things were making any damn sense!"N?v(el)B\\jnn


    Hearing myint, Fay only rolled her eyes with a small smile before moving her foot from the brakes to the gas and pressing down on it.


    Fueled by the richer fuel mix exploding within the pistons of its engine, the buggy sped up in a sh, quickly climbing back to the same velocity it had just before Fay slowed it down.


    Forty kilometers an hour. A crawl for a car on a proper road. A speed that even those still applying for the license would consider quite slow.


    Sure, thanks to the off-road nature of the buggy, we could easily push to twice that speed… But our logistic vessels that independently followed after our buggy could never reach speeds that high, not without tripping on a slight unevenness of the terrain and falling over.


    In the end, though, forty kilometers per hour was a speed that all those who tried to cross the starlight in could only dream of achieving. And that led to quite the sharp rise of the intensity of the light of stairs infused within the air, steadily raising the pressure… and the benefits this pressure brought forth for our strength.


    I could feel the pressure growing with how easily my mood would swing back to the nostalgia and lethargy… but as this pressure reinforced the core aspects of one''s soul, it also became the fuel for the fire of Fay''s aura within my darkness core.


    The mncholy made me sad. Lethargy made mezy and sapped my motivation to do anything. A perfectbo for trapping someone within this in, turning them into the pitiful nourishment for the local nts.


    But at the same time, Fay''s closeness was more than enough to dispel my sadness, recing it with pure joy andfort. And when it came to lethargy, having Fay sit down right upon myp as we crammed ourselves into the singr driver''s seat…


    Feeling the weight of her ass bearing down upon my crotch was the one and only source of excitement I needed to ward off the pressure of my lethargy. But with the very force that put this pressure on me actively stoking the me of Fay''s aura within my soul, all the aspects rted to her only grew stronger.


    Her presence turned fromforting to soothing. Her adorableness turned into sexiness.


    And mere ten minutes after we picked up our trip right where we left it, I could hardly think of anything else but my desire to just bend Fay over the buggy''s steering wheel before iming her hips, for the unkempt time, all for myself.


    And that''s where my hourly check-ups came from, giving me something to focus on beyond just being on the lookout for the spots of direct starlight falling right into the path ahead.


    As strange as it might sound, having a task to focus on made it a lot easier to weather the terms of one''s presence on the in.


    In the end, though, we didn''t get to travel far. After merely two hours of driving deeper and deeper into the in while constantly checking whether we all could still hold against the pressure, we reached a point where we had no other choice but to make a new stop.


    "This one''s massive," I revealed, staring right into a stadium-sized spot of starlight so direct, rather than nourishing the grass of the in it actively burned it out, leaving a dark spot of empty and dead earth right in the middle of the lush in.


    "I can tell," Fay threw, leaning over the steering wheel in an instinctive yet futile attempt at spotting out where the whole ce ended.


    "Do we drive around it?" udy suggested as he popped up from the back of the oversized buggy''s main floor. His eyes twitched a little when he noticed the massive sigil of death engraved into the very flesh of the giant in. As it turned out, it wasn''t enough to make the man exhibit any sort of excessive reaction, though.


    "I mean, we could…" I muttered, looking over to the side to spot where the circr spot of instant death ended, the force of the stairs cutting off within a single inch, with no more but a secondary shine born from the starlight reflecting off the ground to turn the edge of the death-zone into a slight, narrow blur.


    "But?" udy asked, turning his head to the side to give me an intense look.


    "Excuse me?"


    udy hesitated for a second.


    "You sounded like you were going to add, ''but,'' and then say something that would make it obvious we should NOT go around it."


    Patting Fay on her hand to give her a signal to carefully slow down, I turned my head over the shoulder and looked at the man''s face.


    "It''s nothing concrete, just a feeling," I revealed the truth, before casting another gaze towards what seemed like an edge of the nearly perfectly circr shape. Yet, no matter how I looked, its blurry nature made it pretty much impossible to actually determine the location where the influence of direct starlight ended.


    Sensing the focus and attention of both of mypanions, I simply sighed a few times, using this moment to gather and sort my thoughts.


    "It''s just a feeling, but I don''t think we should even attempt crossing over to that side," I pointed out to the right, to where I could more or less still make out the general shape of the edge between the patch of the mind-frying light and the otherwise pretty normal in. "And where ites to the left…"


    Most of the spots of direct light on the stairs were reaching a perfectly circr shape. Yet, as unnatural as it was for something created by nature, right now, we are quite a lot closer to the right edge of the illuminated zone. And while passing by the right of the starlight circle came with a mind-numbing sense of terror growing from deep inside of me…


    If we wanted to pass it over its left edge, we would not only have to backtrack roughly an hour of progress, then drive for one, or two hours more to the left, before finally turning the buggy into the orientation it was in right now, making it rush towards the left side of the deadly zone.


    Both solutions sucked balls. But the option of going left came with yet another, major downside.


    Because just far enough for my eyes to still catch the sight of them, the hills started to converge into a single line, turning into increasingly high mountainous structures.


    In other words, even if we went for the left edge of the starlit zone, we were likely to end up facing insurmountable mountains.


    Discover more content at empire


    And as if all of that wasn''t enough, there was still the topic that gued me ever since I figured out what this refining pressure was.


    The problem… of the changes within my soul and aura weave, changes that my system should be the first to register… Were changed that were nowhere to be seen on my status screen!